This is the public, open source distribution of Apple, Inc.'s CoreFoundation framework, sometimes known as "CF-lite" because it does not contain every facility available from the CoreFoundation framework found in iOS/iPadOS/macOS/tvOS/watchOS. This distribution is refered to as Open CF-lite to distinguish it from the official Apple release, and to reflect the open source, community-based and -driven nature of this project.
This release of Open CF-lite corresponds to the CoreFoundation framework found in Mac OS X 10.7.4, CF-635.21.
This distribution differs from the official Apple, Inc. release of CF-lite in that it is known to build and run on Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux. It should probably be trivial to port to most other POSIX-based environments (volunteers welcome!)
The goal of this port is to provide a feature-compatible, cross- platform version of the official CoreFoundation framework. In general, we do not propose extending functionality beyond the official Apple release so that this project can serve as a drop-in replacement.
To repeat Apple's statement:
What Apple is NOT interested in, with CF-lite:
- Everybody's little convenience methods. Just because "everybody has to write their own", it does not follow immediately that it is a good idea to add it to the system libraries. It is not a goal of CF to be a "Swiss Army Knife"; that just increases the size of the binaries, and the documentation and maintenance burden. Functions to reverse a string or merge two arrays by taking alternate elements from the two arrays are not compelling.
The current release of Open CF-lite is known to work on Windows at a sufficient level to run the WebKit infrastructure.
If you are not using a prebuilt distribution of Open CF-lite, building Open CF-lite should be a straightforward. Start with:
% ./configure
% make
The second configure step generates Makefile files from
Makefile.in files and only needs to be done once unless those input
files have changed.
Although not strictly necessary, the additional step of sanity checking the build results is recommended:
% make check
In addition to depending on the C Standard Libraries, Open CF-lite depends on:
- International Components for Unicode
- Kqueue (FreeBSD and Linux only)
- Time Zone Database
- Universally Unique ID Library
- zlib
The dependencies can either be satisfied by building them directly from source, or on system such as Linux, installing them using a package management system. For example, on Debian systems:
% sudo apt-get install uuid-dev libicu-dev libkqueue-dev zlib1g-dev
There are a number of issues in libkqueue prior to version 2.5.2 that preclude it from working correctly to serve the needs of run loop timers. Consequently, if your distribution does not have libkqueue equal to or later than 2.5.2, you may need to build a suitable version of libkqueue from source and install it.
If you want to modify or otherwise maintain the Open CF-lite build system, see "Maintaining Open CF-lite" below for more information.
To install Open CF-lite for your use simply invoke:
% make install
to install Open CF-lite in the location indicated by the --prefix
configure option (default "/usr/local"). If you intended an
arbitrarily relocatable Open CF-lite installation and passed
--prefix=/ to configure, then you might use DESTDIR to, for
example install Open CF-lite in your user directory:
% make DESTIDIR="${HOME}" install
If you want to maintain, enhance, extend, or otherwise modify Open CF-lite, it is likely you will need to change its build system, based on GNU autotools, in some circumstances.
After any change to the Open CF-lite build system, including any
Makefile.am files or the configure.ac file, you must run the
autoreconf to update the build system.
Due to its leverage of GNU autotools, if you want to modify or
otherwise maintain the Open CF-lite build system, the following
additional packages are required and are invoked by autoreconf:
- autoconf
- automake
- libtool
When supported on Linux, on Debian-based Linux distributions such as Ubuntu, these Open CF-lite build system dependencies can be satisfied with the following:
% sudo apt-get install autoconf automake libtool
On Mac OS X, these dependencies can be installed and satisfied using Brew:
% brew install autoconf automake libtool
There are numerous avenues for Open CF-lite support:
- Bugs and feature requests - submit to the Issue Tracker
Open CF-lite follows Apple's upstream CoreFoundation versioning.
Open CF-lite is released under the Apple Public Source License 2.0 license.
See the LICENSE file for more information.
Enjoy!
- Brent Fulgham bfulgham@gmail.com
- Grant Erickson gerickson@nuovations.com