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Build Shell is intended to help manage development builds

Often developers end up managing many different environments on their
development machine. The author has multiple different configuration of Qt
build on his development machine, and some have dependencies on other projects
not affiliated with qt-project, and hence not using qmake.

It is also often cumbersome to move to a different development machine (say to
a laptop for when you go travelling). Hence there is a need to automate
managing the different development environments a developer has. And the
solution should not be bounded to the build system nor the source control
management system.

Build Shell uses a json like format to describe a build, from now called a
buildset. A buildset is fed into the build_shell application together with some
parameters. Most importantly:

-s --src-dir: This is the directory where sources will be pulled down and
looked for when building

-b --build-dir: This is the directory where the projects will make sub
directories and build their projects inside the subdirectories

-i --install-dir: This is the directory where projects that needs to install
files will use as their prefix

-f --buildset: This is the file which is used as input for where to pull
sources down from and how to build them

Also the build_shell executable takes an additional parameter called mode. Mode
can be either:

create: in Creation mode the build_shell application expects the -s parameter
to be present. It will use this directory to create a buildset file. It can be
used in conjunction with the -f parameter. Then build_set will use try and take
the input build_set file and update it before it prints it to stdout.

pull: in Pull mode build_shell will try and update the projects specified by in
buildset file for the matching sub-directories given by the -s parameter

build: in Build mode build_shell will try and build all the projects defined in
the build_set file. It will build them in subdirectories of -b mathching the
directories in -s. It will ignore directories not mentioned in the buildset
file.

The build mode till also generate a snapshot buildset file inside a special
directory call $BUILD_DIR/build_shell/build_sets This is so that it is fairly
easy to to backtrack to an older build (since the git shas etc are stored in
the build_set file).

The build mode will also generate two shell scripts. One for setting the
environment suitable for this build, and on for unsetting the environment.
Their located inside $BUILD_DIR/build_shell.

Pne last thing the build mode does is that it register the build in a config
file in $HOME/.config/build_shell/available_builds.json This file is used in by
the build_shell completion script.

The build_shell completion script is a script which is meant to be sourced in
your .profile/.bashrc/.bash_profile file.

It defines 3 handy functions:

bs (tung in cheek)

bss

bcd

Lets start with bss bss stands for build_shell select and allows you to easily
select one of the builds registered in the available_builds.json. sources the
set_build_env.sh file for the appropriate build.

bs works as a wrapper around the build_shell command. The environment knows
about the src-dir build-dir, install-dir and a copy of the current buildset
file, once the set_build_env.sh of a build is sourced. So bs allows you to
execute the build_shell commands for the current environment.

bcd is a function which allows you to navigate between your build-dir and
src-dir. Its quite handy.

To play around with build_shell try configuring it with
--enable-developer-build. This will setup defines while building so that there
wont be a need to install anything.