Autobuild

Autobuild is an in-house framework for maintaining and building libraries. It acts as director providing a common interface to build and package libraries, but it is not a build system like make or cmake. You will still need platform specific make, cmake, or project files to actually configure and build your library. Autobuild will, however, allow you invoke these commands and package the product with a common interface. (for Linden old hands: Autobuild is designed as a replacement for the old lindenlib policies, doing the right thing so you don't have to.)

Important: Linden Lab Autobuild is not the same as or derived from GNU Autobuild, but they are similar enough to cause confusion.

Getting Autobuild

Autobuild is available as a Mercurial repository:

https://bitbucket.org/lindenlab/autobuild  

Installing Autobuild

You can either run the autobuild command directly from the "bin" directory in a working copy of that repository, or install it as a normal python package by running

python setup.py install

from the top level directory of the working copy. You may need administrative privilege on your system to install into system command directories.

Note: if you intend to run autobuild from a cygwin shell on windows, it is strongly recommended that you run python setup.py install rather than run it directly from the checkout. This is the most reliable way to ensure that cygwin paths get correctly translated to native windows paths for python. Then ensure that your python scripts directory (for example C:/Program Files/python26/Scripts) is in your PATH.

Running Autobuild

Usage:

      autobuild [-v] [--help [HELP]] [--dry-run] [--quiet] [--verbose]
                [--debug]
                
                {installables,configure,package,edit,upload,manifest,build,install,print,source_environment,uninstall}
                ...

Sub Commands:

autobuild build

Builds platform targets.

autobuild configure

Configures platform targets.

autobuild edit

Manage build and package configuration.

autobuild install

Fetch and install package archives.

autobuild installables

Manipulate installable package entries in the autobuild configuration.

autobuild manifest

Manipulate manifest entries to the autobuild configuration.

autobuild package

Creates an archive of build output.

autobuild print

Print configuration.

autobuild source_environment

Prints out the shell environment Autobuild-based buildscripts to use (by calling 'eval').

autobuild uninstall

Uninstall package archives.

autobuild upload

upload tool for autobuild

Options:

-v, --version
--help [HELP]	find all valid Autobuild Tools and show help
--dry-run	run tool in dry run mode if available
--quiet	minimal output
--verbose	verbose output
--debug

Background and Tutorials

Autobuild How To

A tutorial introduction to using autobuild

Autobuild Lexicon

A list of terms and how they are used in the context of autobuild

Autobuild Package Layout

Describes the standard directory tree for packages managed with autobuild

Autobuild Quick Start

A basic walkthrough of how to add autobuild management to an existing software project

Autobuild Class Model

Describes the fundamental objects in the autobuild design and the relationships between them.

Autobuild Examples

Links to packages built with autobuild.

Build Script Anatomy

An annotated build script typical of those used to build third party libraries.

Autobuild Shell Functions

A description of all shell functions provided by Autobuild for use in build scripts.

Contributing to Autobuild

Autobuild is open source. Improvements are most welcome.

• Discussion of and help with Autobuild are available on the opensource-dev mailing list and the #opensl channel on the freenode.org IRC network.
• Bug reports and feature suggestions are tracked in the Open Development project on jira.secondlife.com.
  • Suggested patches for issues from the jira are reviewed on our code review system (see the documentation on how to use it).