MPS Wiki: Build System

This wiki article contains incomplete and informal notes about the MPS, the precursor to more formal documentation. Not confidential. Readership: MPS users and developers.

MPS Build System

Buildsys (the MPS build system) does these things:

Exist 3 dimensions:

• PFM -- platform
• TARGET -- the build product (library, test-executable, etc) you want to build
• VARIETY -- eg debug, release, etc

You can specify these if you wish. Indeed, you *must* specify PFM, by passing its makefile to make (or nmake) with the -f (or /f) flag. You may specify TARGET and VARIETY on the command-line to make ("VARIETY=di").

If you don't specify TARGET and VARIETY, the buildsys uses the following defaults:

• for TARGET, default is the pseudo-target "all", which is a list that includes mps.a (or mps.lib) and many unit tests;
• for VARIETY, default is to recursively invoke make (or nmake) for each of 'the usual varieties'.

(The pseudo-targets that fill-in these defaults have confusing names: the rule that expands varieties is called "target:" (probably because the TARGET is known by this point), and the rule invoked when TARGET and VARIETY are both known is called "variety:").

Once values for PFM, TARGET, and VARIETY are known, there's a rule that prepends the path "PFM/VARIETY/" to TARGET, to make sure that the built files will appear in the appropriate subdirectory. (Effectively making "foo" a useful shorthand for "PFM/VARIETY/foo").

How to see the compiler-flags, etc, used by the build

Try defining NOISY=1 on the make command line.

Or, start by finding the final recursive make call: it will be the command-line that ends with the pseudo-target "variety". Edit comm.gmk (or commpost.nmk) and add the -n (or /n) flag to that make command.

B. Document History

  2008-09-29  RHSK  Created.

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