AMBuild API (2.0)

AMBuild scripts have access to the following object types:

• Context: Exposed as the builder, this is the entry point for the API and is known as a configure context.
• NodeBuilder: Represents a node in the dependency graph that may or may not be committed to the database.
• Compiler: An abstraction representing a C++ compiler environment.
• Vendor: An abstraction representing a C++ compiler vendor (GCC, MSVC, Clang, etc).
• BinaryBuilder: An abstraction for building C++ compilation jobs.

As a general rule, AMBuild uses the following conventions:

• Methods starting with an upper-case letter are considered public API.
• Methods starting with a lower-case letter are considered private and should not be used.
• Properties and attributes ending with an underscore are considered private and should not be used.
• Spaces are used instead of tabs, and two-space indents are preferred.

Contexts

Contexts are implemented in ambuild2/frontend/base_gen.py. They are the entry point for using AMBuild. They have the following properties:

• compiler - An instance of a Compiler object, or None if DetectCompilers was never called. Calling DetectCompilers will set the compiler field for this and all future contexts.
• parent - The context that loaded the current context.
• script - The path, relative to sourcePath, of the current build script.
• sourcePath - The absolute path to the source tree.
• options - The result of evaluating command-line options from configure.py, via the optparse module.
• buildPath - The absolute path to the build folder.
• buildFolder - The working directory of jobs in this context, relative to buildPath.

Methods:

• SetBuildFolder(folder) - Sets the working directory of jobs in this context, relative to buildPath.
  • folder - A string representing the folder path. '.' and './' are allowed.
  • Returns None.
• DetectCompilers() - Detects C and C++ compilers and raises an exception if neither are available or they do not match. Should only be called once.
  • Returns a Compiler object that is also accessible via the compiler attribute.
• RunBuildScripts(files, vars={}) - Runs additional build scripts.
  • files - An iterable containing a list of file paths relative to path of the current build script, or a string containing such a path.
  • vars - An optional dictionary of global variables to set in each child build script. The dictionary is merged with the global variables passed into our current script. Variables with the same name are overridden by the new dictionary.
  • Returns None.