BSDBuild is portable to many operating systems including most flavors of Unix, MacOS and Windows. It requires a standard make utility (such as GNU make or BSD make), a Bourne shell and the commands test, echo and sed.

Security, ease of testing and debuggability has always been a consideration in the design of BSDBuild.

• BSDBuild configure scripts are simpler than autoconf scripts. They do not use shell functions or complicated tricks in general. They use a minimal number of commands (mainly test, echo and sed).
• BSDBuild configure scripts may be easily regenerated by running mkconfigure. In a ports/packages setting, maintainers only need to review configure.in and use BSDBuild to regenerate (or diff against) configure as part of the packaging process.
• The config.log generated by BSDBuild configure scripts contains a copy of all of the tests performed. Each test can be manually replayed by copy/pasting the relevant config.log fragment to the shell.
• With BSDBuild's make libraries, the make install target is guaranteed to only perform basic file installations (e.g., running install). It will never trigger any type of compilation or last-minute generation process. By design, make install never implies make all.

At this time, executables and libraries can be compiled from sources in Ada, C, C++, Objective C, assembler, Lex and Yacc. Adding support for more languages is straightforward.

The language of a source file in a ${SRCS} lists is determined by its file extension. Refer to the current build.prog.mk and build.lib.mk manual pages for the complete list.

Yes, you can pass --host to any BSDBuild ./configure script and it will arrange for cross-compilation to the given target. BSDBuild also provides special support for the cc65 compiler to 65(C)02 based platforms and emscripten for compiling to WebAssembly.

The following should allow you to compile a "Hello world" program in C.

First, create a directory for the project and use the mkify prog command to create a copy of the files required by the build.prog.mk module:

  $ mkdir hello
  $ cd hello
  $ mkify prog
  Installing in mk: ...
  Installing scripts: ...

mkify should create a subdirectory mk and an empty Makefile. Open up the Makefile in an editor and add the directives:

  TOP=.
  PROG= hello
  SRCS= hello.c
  include ${TOP}/mk/build.prog.mk

A minimal hello.c might look like:

  #include <stdio.h>
  
  int
  main(int argc, char *argv[])
  {
      printf("Hello, world!\n");
      return (0);
  }

Now you can run make depend for the first time to generate dependencies:

  $ touch .depend
  $ make depend

Finally, compile the program with make:

  $ make
  cc -O2 -pipe -o hello.o -c hello.c

  $ ./hello
  Hello, world!

Next, you might want to add a configure script. Create a file called configure.in with the following:

# Example BSDBuild configure script.
# ex:syn=bsdbuild

package("hello")
version("1.0")

register("--some-option", "An example option")
register("--enable-warnings", "Enable compiler warnings")

require(cc)
check_header(stdio.h)

if [ "${enable_warnings}" = "yes" ]; then
  c_option(-Wall)
  c_option(-Werror)
  c_option(-Wmissing-prototypes)
fi

# Write definitions to a config/ directory?
c_incdir_config(config)

# Write definitions to a single config.h file?
#c_include_config(config.h)

To compile to a POSIX-style configure script, use the mkconfigure command:

  $ cat configure.in | mkconfigure > configure
  $ chmod 755 configure

You can create a standard build.lib.mk makefile and use relative path names in ${SRCS}, for example:

  TOP=	.
  LIB=	mylib
  SRCS=	source1.c \
        subdir1/source2.c \
        subdir2/source3.c
  
  include ${TOP}/Makefile.config
  include ${TOP}/mk/build.lib.mk

Yes, by including only build.subdir.mk, and setting the targets explicitely:

  
  TOP=	.
  
  SUBDIR= dir1 \
          dir2
  
  all: all-subdir
  install: install-subdir
  deinstall: deinstall-subdir
  clean: clean-subdir
  cleandir: cleandir-subdir
  depend: depend-subdir
  
  include ${TOP}/mk/build.subdir.mk

Yes, you can set ${GMONOUT} to the desired output filename and then invoke:

  
  $ make ${GMONOUT}
  

To ignore files generated by make depend and configure:

Makefile.config
config.log
config.status
.depend

# If configure uses c_incdir_config():
config/

# If configure uses c_include_config():
config.h

# If configure uses config_script():
myprogram-config

# If configure uses pkgconfig_mod():
myprogram.pc

*.so
*.so.*
*.dll
*.exe
*.o
*.obj
*.res
*.lib
*.a
*.la
*.lo
*.dSYM
*.lnk
*.err
*.exp
*.map
*.orig
*~
*.swp
*.tmp
*.rej