build_system.md

VMF Build System Documentation

Overview

Debug build

On linux, in order to build the project in debug mode, execute the following from the project root directory.

$ cd build
$ cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug ..
$ make install -j8

On windows, a different build type can be provided at the command line (or the debug target type can be selected from the drop-down box at the top of the Visual Studio GUI).

cd build
cmake --build . --target INSTALL --config Debug

Alternate Compiler Support

VMF has been tested on linux to build with either g++ or clang++. To specify the preferred compiler use the CMAKE_CXX_COMPILER compiler flag.

$ cmake -DCMAKE_CXX_COMPILER=g++ ..

$ cmake -DCMAKE_CXX_COMPILER=clang++ ..

On Windows, VMF has only been tested with the MSVC compilers.

Generate Doxygen Documentation

To generate class level Doxygen documentation, run the following commands. (Doxygen must be installed first.)

cd docs/doxygen
doxygen Doxyfile.in

Open [docs/doxygen/html/index.html] to browse the resulting html documentation.

To rebuild the PDF version of the documentation, run the following additional commands:

cd docs/doxygen/latex
make

Open docs/doxygen/latex/refman.pdf to view the resulting PDF documentation.

Adding New External Projects

Third party source libraries should be added to vmf/dependencies. There are three steps:

1. Modify or create a CMakeLists.txt file for the project. You may need to disable the project's install commands to avoid putting unwanted artifacts in our install.

2. Add the license information to vmf/dependencies/licences

3. Put the add_subdirectory() command in vmf/dependecies/CMakeLists.txt. In general, build the library as static where possible so it can be linked into a monolithic VMFFramework.so/VMFFramework.dll.