Table of Contents
In this chapter, we will describe the basics of running abuild
on a few simple build items, and we will describe how those build
items are constructed. We will gloss over many details that will
be covered later in the documentation. The goal of this chapter
is to give you enough information to work on simple build items
that belong to existing build trees. Definitions of
build item and build
tree appear below. More detailed information on them
can be found in Chapter 4, Build Items and Build Trees. The
examples we refer to in this chapter can be found in
doc/example/basic in your abuild source or
binary distribution.
Abuild imposes few system-based restrictions on how you set it up and use it, but here are a few important things to keep in mind:
Avoid putting spaces in path names wherever possible. Although abuild tries to behave properly with respect to spaces in path names and is known to handle many cases correctly, make is notoriously bad at it. If you try to use spaces in path names, it is very likely that you will eventually run into problems as they generally cause trouble in a command-line environment.
Be careful about the lengths of path names. Although abuild itself imposes no limits on this, you may run up against operating system limits if your paths are too long. In particular, Windows has a maximum path name length of 260 characters. If you have a build tree whose root already has a long path and you then have Java classes that are buried deep within a package-based directory structure, you can bump into the 260-character limit faster than you'd think. On Windows, it is recommended that you keep your build tree roots as close to the root of the drive as possible. On any modern UNIX system, you should not run into any path name length issues.