Jagen

Jagen eases the development of multiple interdependent software packages by generating a meta project which abstracts the peculiarities of their respective build and source control systems and provides instruments to uniformly manage them as a whole.

It mainly targets embedded development use cases when things should be done "your way" instead of shoving the requirements into rigid paradigms of Yocto and Buildroot. In particular, integrating third-party SDKs, pre-built toolchains or packages with non-standard build systems intended to be a straightforward process. The focus is on ease of use and adoption rather than trying to provide yet another idiosyncratic collection of recipes for every possible piece of software. On the other hand, vendor and project-specific recipe libraries and patches are well-supported and adding packages using mainstream build systems (such as Autotools and CMake) is trivial.

The generated build system is simple to understand and customize. It collects all commands outputs and allows to selectively repeat any stage (such as configure or compile) of a single or multiple packages respecting the dependencies and running to completion of a certain target such as creation of a filesystem image. It is possible to combine multiple projects or parts into a single product using the concept of "layers".

The built-in workspace management facilities allow SCM-controlled (Git and Mercurial) packages to be inspected, updated, cleaned up, etc. using universal commands. They replicate the most common use cases of Google's Repo and gclient tools such as cloning and updating of multiple repositories. The sources in the form of distribution archives are also supported. They will be automatically downloaded and verified during the build. The source repositories and archives are cached and can be shared between different projects.

Jagen is a mature project which is used in production since 2014.

Getting Started

For a quick start using Jagen do the following steps:

1. Create a directory for the project and enter it:

mkdir root-jagen && cd root-jagen

2. Clone Jagen repository and initialize the project:

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/bazurbat/jagen/master/init | sh

3. Add the following to the rules.lua file in the current directory:

package { 'nanomsg', 'host',
    source = 'https://github.com/nanomsg/nanomsg.git',
    build  = 'cmake'
}

4. Build it:

./jagen build

The nanomsg is just an example of something small and quick to compile for demonstration purposes.

During the build the environment will be initialized, the nanomsg sources will be cloned to the src subdirectory, compiled using the default "host" toolchain and installed to the host subdirectory. You are now all set.

Do not forget to add jagen/misc/bash_completion to your Bash completion configuration to make overall experience much more pleasant.

See User Guide for more information.