build2 | 0.8.0 Release Notes

These notes provide a more detailed discussion of major new features, including the motivation for implementing them and their usage examples. For the complete list of changes, see the Release Announcement or the NEWS files in the individual packages.

Build System

The build system again saw a lot of development in this release cycle. One of the more visible new additions is the Introduction chapter that covers every aspect of the build infrastructure, including the underlying concepts, for the canonical executable and library projects as produced by bdep-new(1) . So if the lack of the build system documentation was (understandably) deterring you from trying build2 out, that obstacle is now gone.

Another notable new feature is support for header-only libraries which, in build2 , are actually handled with more general binary-less libraries (that will also cover module interface-only libraries in modularized codebases). And while on this subject, utility libraries now use thin archives where available.

On the C++ modules front, build2 now handles the leading module; marker (introduced in P0713R1 and adopted by the merged modules proposal). It is now also using the new GCC module mapper interface ( -fmodule-mapper ).

There are also a couple of new build system modules: in for pre-processing .in files and bash that provides modularization support for bash scripts. The latter is a good example of using build2 for things other than C/C++.

Project Dependency Manager

The project dependency manager, bdep(1) , added two new commands: bdep-ci(1) and bdep-publish(1) .

The ci command allows you to submit your project to a CI server for remote testing. To complement this command we have also setup the free ci.cppget.org service for open source projects. Here is an example to give you an idea:

$ bdep ci submitting: to: https://ci.cppget.org in: https://github.com/boris-kolpackov/hello.git#master@33f34830 package: hello version: 0.1.0-a.0.20180912094305.33f34830383d continue? [y/n] y ################################################################ 100.0% CI request is queued: https://ci.cppget.org/@63e77df0-5d11-4d09-b69a-2566ac6ea848

You can even visit the returned URL and view the result for the next 30 days or so. To see how all this fits into the overall development workflow, check the Hello, World section in the Toolchain Introduction.

The publish command allows you to submit your project for inclusion into an archive repository, such as cppget.org. To see how this works, check the Versioning and Release Management section in the Toolchain Introduction.

Another notable new feature is the unit testing support (in addition to integration/functional testing that was already there) in projects produced by the bdep-new(1) command.