Releases.
The Mknew Project
The Mknew Project is an investigation
of how to build simple Unix shell scripts
to manage common development
and administrative tasks.
The emphasis is
on using languages and tools
that already exist
and are in common use
rather than inventing something new.
The project also focuses
on exploring the functional programming nature
of the bash shell.
The project developers are
Martin J. McGowan, III,
and William L. Anderson.
They have been exploring
how to use the full power
of the Bourne, Korn,
and now Bash, shells
for more than two decades.
Mknew Programming Style
The Mknew project is
an exploration
of a functional, building-block approach
to software tool development.
And part
of this exploration
is the investigation
of shell programming style
principles
and guidelines.
One programming principle
is to use,
as often as is practicable,
one-line functions
that carry out specific tasks
with a minimum of side effects.
Writing simple
and easy to read
one-line functions is based
on using three coding guidelines
(N.B., these guidelines exploit specific capabilities
of the bash shell
and Unix-like operating systems.):
- Avoid shell variables; generate values inline and try functional composition first.
- Replace "if, then, else" with "&&" or "||" operators (thanks to
John R. Levine for this insight).
- Avoid temp files where stdin, stdout, and stderr are still
available.
A second programming style principle
is to build scripts
as a series of function calls
that have a minimum of syntax.
This is accomplished
by using the bash function capability,
and the "$(" ")"syntax
to delay function execution,
in mknew libraries.
This allows building scripts
that have a Lisp-like function syntax.
Capturing and factoring the syntax
of procedure details
into bash funtions
permits shell scripts to be written
as a series of function calls
with minimal syntax.
A common syntactical pattern
in mknew scripts is
verb noun noun noun ...
or, somewhat more precisely,
function argument1 argument2 ...
The goal of mknew
is to provide a way to specify
make
procedures
of heterogeneous components
in a bash script.
These components can include
- diverse source code languages,
- documentation texts,
- test procedures and
- data.
mknew supports the integration of software build procedures with other
software development administration procedures, such as unit,
integration, and systems testing; distribution; and installation.
In addition to the mknew function library,
these "make" procedures rely only on tools
provided by the bash shell,
and common Unix command line utilities.
The development plan for mknew
is to first provide a simple example
of shell-based software installation procedures.
The first useful result of the project
is the mknew package.
The mknew package delivers a library of bash
functions, mklib
and a shell procedure called mk.
mk works by reading the library of functions and
a simple, easy to read, shell file, called mkd
that contains a series of function calls.
The first release
of mknew will simply install its library mklib
and scripts mk and mkd
in a standard directory structure
in the user's "$HOME" directory.
Subsequent releases of
mknew will support specification
of a software package in terms of its PRIMARY source and
shared INPUT components (other packages or libraries), and the TOOLS and
process elements required to produce the target OUTPUT elements. For
example, a common makefile template, such as:
target: depends ...
process depends ... > target
will be specified in the mkd shell as
newest target depends ... || process depends ... > target
Here newest is a shell function that returns FALSE if any element in the
depends list is newer than the specified target.
The benefits of the mknew library include:
-
readable build specifications (shell functions provide literate
specification of elements; e.g., "cprogram", "shellfile", "manpage", ...);
-
consistent build specifications and procedures for any language or
environment;
-
a build process that works on any platform that provides a bash
(version 2.0 or newer) shell
and common Unix command line tools.
Simply put, one mknew objective is
to support standardization of build process specification
across a variety of software development and deployment platforms
using existing shell tools.
As mknew evolves,
a number of releases will be supported.
At this writing,
the target is three,
with these capabilities:
-
The
first releases -- minimum functionality; basically the
libraries simply install themselves. They demonstrate a "make
install" procedure.
-
Early modifications -- when compared to the first release,
they will show how to add functionality
to existing mknew libraries.
-
The proverbial latest and greatest.
These links will be active
when the relevant available software
is available for download.
$Id: MknewProject.html 91 2006-09-20 16:26:17Z $
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