For target type object-code, platform identifiers are of the form os.cpu.toolset.compiler[.option], described below. In all cases, each field of the platform identifier must consist only of lower-case letters, numbers, dash, or underscore. The fields of the platform identifier are as follows:
A broad description of the operating system, such as linux, solaris, windows, cygwin, or vxworks
A CPU type identifier such as ix86, x86_64, ppc, ppc64, or sparc.
A user-defined label for a collection of tools. This is a convenience field to separate things like different versions of compilers or runtime libraries. It can be set to any string, at which point the user is responsible for ensuring that it does in fact define a meaningful collection of tools. By default, abuild will create a toolset name based on the operating system distribution or similar factors. Examples include rhel4 on a Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 system, or deb5 on a Debian GNU/Linux 5.x system. [12]
An identifier for the compiler C/C++ compiler toolchain to be used. Abuild has built-in support for gcc on UNIX systems and for Microsoft Visual C++ and mingw on Windows systems. Users can provide their own compiler toolchains in addition to these. The mechanism for adding new compilers is described in Section 29.3, “Adding Platform Types and Platforms”.
An optional field that is used to pass additional information to the GNU Make code that implements support for the compiler. Typical uses for options would be to define different debugging, profiling, or optimization levels.
All of the fields of the platform identifier are made available
in separate variables within the interface parsing system. In
addition, for object-code build items, the make
variable $(CCXX_TOOLCHAIN) is set to the value
of the compiler field. Here are some example platform
identifiers:
| linux.ppc64.proj1default.gcc |
| linux.ppc64.proj1default.gcc.release |
| linux.ppc64.proj1default.gcc.debug |
| linux.x86.fc5.gcc |
| linux.x86.fc5.gcc.release |
| linux.x86.fc5.gcc.debug |
| windows.ix86.nt5.msvc |
| windows.ix86.cygwin-nt5.mingw |
| vxworks.pc604.windriver.vxgcc |
[12]
At present, it is possible to add new toolsets easily with
plugins, but the only way to override
the built-in default toolset would be to edit
private/bin/get_native_platform_data,
the perl script abuild uses to determine this information
at startup. This may be addressed in a future version of
abuild.