🌲 Project Compositor

Project composition adds remote or local files (and directories) to a project. The project, as stored in a source code management sytem like git, would commonly not include these files. These files would typically be part of your build process (Makefile) though. So after a checkout, you need to run the project composition to complete the project complete.

Quick Demo

For project composition only the most barebones, unencumbered virtual environment is needed to store a few settings. On the assumption, that we are in the right place already, prepare the virtual environment:

mulle-sde init --no-post-init -s none/wild none

As mulle-sde will not be used for building, its most convenient to use the none/wild environment style. This makes the virtual environment completely unencumbered.

Add a LICENSE file

With the dependency add --embedded command a LICENSE file will be downloaded from a remote source and placed into the project root at a later time:

mulle-sde dependency add --embedded \
                         --address LICENSE \
                         https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.txt

If there was a gpl-latest.txt, we would be up to date with the latest GPL automatically.

Add some source code

Add a small hash library from the “mulle-c” project and place it into src.

mulle-sde dependency add \
   --embedded \
   --address src/farmhash \
   https://github.com/mulle-c/farmhash-c/archive/refs/tags/latest.tar.gz

Run the composition

With these dependency definitions in place, it’s now time to run mulle-sde fetch to compose the project.

To get rid of the embedded files, use mulle-sde clean tidy. Project composition is fairly powerful. You can add and remove embedded dependencies and change their URLs at will. A new mulle-sde fetch will track the changes and synchronize your project.

Final Words

If you don’t need any other functionality from mulle-sde, you can get project composition from mulle-sourcetree only. You would not need to run mulle-sde init then.

The fetching of archives and git repositories is done with mulle-fetch. mulle-fetch relies on heuristics to save typework. This will work fine in common cases, but needs explicitness, when it fails. Nevertheless just having to type mulle-fetch --github mulle-c mulle-container to fetch a repository or mulle-fetch https://github.com/mulle-c/mulle-buffer/archive/refs/tags/latest.tar.gz to download and unpack a github tar link is handy.