Fatso Package Manager

Fatso is a bundling package manager for compiled projects written in C. Think Bundler for C/C++ projects.

Fatso downloads and builds all dependencies of your project, and installs them in a locally contained folder, so your project can build and link against them with zero system dependencies.

Fatso supports the following build systems:

Autotools
CMake (TODO)
Plain GNU Make (TODO)
SCons (TODO)
bjam (TODO)
Custom scripts

Fatso is still in very early stages of development.

Getting Started

Create a fatso.yml in your project. It's just a basic YAML-file specifying your dependencies, and it could look like this:

project: my_project
version: 0.0.1
author: Simon Ask Ulsnes <simon@ulsnes.dk>
dependencies:
- ['libyaml', '~> 0.1.4']

The above project has a single dependency: libyaml, at fuzzy version 0.1.4.

To install the dependencies after having modified fatso.yml, run:

$ fatso install

To build your project, run:

$ fatso build

Fatso will automatically detect the toolchain your project is using. If it fails to detect it, or your project needs special care while building, you have two options:

Tell Fatso about it, by setting toolchain: <build commands> in your fatso.yml. Fatso will set the CFLAGS/LDFLAGS environment variables with the necessary options to build against your local Fatso environment, so if your build tool takes those into account, you should be fine.
Integrate Fatso into your existing build scripts by letting them call fatso cflags and fatso ldflags in the relevant phases. Both commands print the CFLAGS/LDFLAGS needed to build against your project's Fatso environment.

Frequently Asked Questions

Will package XYZ be supported by Fatso?

Hard to say. Most "well-behaved" software packages, i.e. packages that build according to the usual conventions and don't assume that they're installed in system-wide directories, should be trivial to support. Less well behaved packages may require special patches or upstream support to be buildable in an isolated environment.

Are Fatso projects relocatable?

That depends if all your dependencies are relocatable. To be certain, run fatso clean and fatso install after moving your project.

Dependencies

POSIX system (Linux, OS X)
GNU Make or compatible
C99 compiler (Clang or GCC should both work)
libyaml
Git (git tool must be in $PATH)
curl (curl tool must be in $PATH)

Building

Run make.

Run make test to build and run tests.

Windows Support

Windows support is not a priority at the moment, and design decisions will not be made with non-POSIX systems in mind. However, patches to accommodate POSIX layers on Windows such as Cygwin will be accepted.

simonask/fatso