EPI-BU-0001

Title

Building PorterPackage for Unix, Windows and Mac

One line summary

Instead of building binary builds of EiffelStudio, the idea is to provide a package, called the PorterPackage, which contains only the delivery files along with the C code necessary to compile the binaries.

Status

Started but not completed

Description

Currently, EiffelStudio has 3 main platforms:

  • Unix
  • Windows
  • Mac OS

To port EiffelStudio on the different flavor of Unix, we have something called a PorterPackage that will let you compile and then install EiffelStudio on your platform even if you do not have EiffelStudio already installed. The script that builds the PorterPackage builds the C code from the Eiffel code and package it with some shell scripts (written in sh) that will let you compile it on any Unix platforms.

Unfortunately, this does not apply to Windows and Mac OS. The idea of the project is to update the script that does the PorterPackage for Unix and make it also builds a PorterPackage for Windows and Mac OS.

There was some prior work for that but it was not complete (see the Build_tool page) since it only builds a binary distribution of EiffelStudio.

Skills needed

Knowledge of some building tools such as Makefile, Ant (possibly others) and scripting (sh, bash and others). Low level of knowledge is required of Eiffel or C.

Difficulty

Medium

Benefits

Student will get to learn Eiffel and how easy it is to compile once and deploy/compile the C generated code on many platforms. Community can actually build the EiffelStudio suite themselves without waiting someone to build it for their platform.

Licensing

GPLv2

Documentation

On http://dev.eiffel.com for the internal alongside properly documented script files.

Submitter

Emmanuel Stapf

Possible mentor

Emmanuel Stapf