When abuild is invoked with no options, the effect is now as if the --with-deps or, equivalently, --build=current option had been specified. To select the old behavior of building just the item without its dependencies, use the newly added --no-deps option.

The preferred way of passing variables to backend build systems is now to specify VAR=value on the command line. Such definitions are passed to all backends. You should use this rather than the --make or (now deprecated and mostly unsupported) --ant option.

Abuild has a new online help system, described in Chapter 8, Help System. The targets rules-help and interface-help have been removed in favor of the new system.

Abuild now prints elapsed clock time before it exits.

When one or more build items fail, abuild now provides a summary that lists the failed build items.

It is now possible to declare local and non-recursive interface variables and also to declare and initialize interface variables in a single statement. For details, see Chapter 17, The Abuild Interface System.

The new Abuild.conf key name replaces this as the way to provide the name of a build item. Note that you should not go around replacing this with name manually in existing Abuild.conf files as abuild will do this automatically when you run abuild --upgrade-trees (Appendix C, Upgrading from 1.0 to Version 1.1).

The new Abuild.conf key attributes can be used to assign particular supported attributes to build items. For details, see Section 15.1, “Abuild.conf Syntax”.

It is possible to declare plugins to be global. Global plugins are discussed in Section 29.2, “Global Plugins”.

Build item dependencies and also newly added build tree dependencies can be declared optional; see Chapter 28, Optional Dependencies. To go along with this, child directories specified in child-dirs can also be made optional.

The ABUILD_FORCE_32BIT environment variable is no longer considered temporary, and the ABUILD_FORCE_64BIT has been added to encourage abuild to generate code of the specified word size. It is initially only supported for builds that use the gcc compiler. A future version of abuild may offer a better solution.

The msvc toolchain can now be configured to make it easier to support different runtime and management flags, making it possible to build applications that statically link the runtime environment or work with the .NET framework. For details, see Section 18.2.2, “Options for the msvc Compiler”.

Shared library version information is now partially supported when building DLL files. For details, see Chapter 21, Shared Libraries.

The behavior of when expansion of the build set is repeated during application of --related-by-traits has changed and is now controlled by --repeat-expansion. For details, see Section 33.5, “Construction of the Build Set”.

The new argument --with-rdeps can be used to add reverse dependencies of all specified items to the build set.

The new command line option --find has been added to print the location of build items or build trees.

The new command line options --ro-path and --rw-path have been added to allow certain parts of the build tree to be treated as read only. For details, see Chapter 12, Explicit Read-Only and Read/Write Paths.

The new command line argument --compat-level and environment variable ABUILD_COMPAT_LEVEL have been added to specify abuild's compatibility level. Abuild will not support any features that were deprecated at a version equal to or older than the specified compatibility level.

Some build sets will build more items in an upgraded forest than they would have in version 1.0. For example, the build set all now really builds all items including those in trees that your starting build item's tree doesn't depend on. Also, the build set desc will really include all build items at or below the current directory even if they are in trees that are not dependencies of the current tree.

A new build set, deptrees, has been added. This build set includes all items in the current tree and its tree dependencies. It essentially does what all did in version 1.0. These concepts are described in Chapter 7, Multiple Build Trees. See also Section B.5, “Redesigned Build Tree Structure”.

The clean target is no longer passed to the backend when abuild is invoked from an output directory. All clean targets have been removed from rules provided by abuild and from the examples.

Platform-specific dependencies on object-code build items are now influenced platform selectors. To create a dependency on the default platform of a given platform type regardless of platform selectors (which was the old behavior), specific -platform=type:default in your dependency declaration.

The list_platforms script, for plugins that add platforms, is now invoked with information about the native platform. See Section 29.3.2, “Adding Platforms”.

A new utility has been added to help with caching the results of code generators. For details, see Section 22.6, “Caching Generated Files”.

A new file, preplugin.mk, can now contain make code to be run by every selected plugin before Abuild.mk is loaded. This can be used to provide initialization of certain variables, among other purposes.

QTest support now automatically exports the TC_SRCS variable to the environment, so individual Abuild.mk files no longer need to do so.

The verify-compiler command now accepts the --cross option to better support cross compilers that are in the native platform type. See Section 29.4, “Adding Toolchains” for a discussion.