This completely removes the old system of mkfiles.pl + Recipe + .R
files that I used to manage the various per-platform makefiles and
other build scripts in this code base. In its place is a
CMakeLists.txt setup, which is still able to compile for Linux,
Windows, MacOS, NestedVM and Emscripten.
The main reason for doing this is because mkfiles.pl was a horrible
pile of unmaintainable cruft. It was hard to keep up to date (e.g.
didn't reliably support the latest Visual Studio project files); it
was so specific to me that nobody else could maintain it (or was even
interested in trying, and who can blame them?), and it wasn't even
easy to _use_ if you weren't me. And it didn't even produce very good
makefiles.
In fact I've been wanting to hurl mkfiles.pl in the bin for years, but
was blocked by CMake not quite being able to support my clang-cl based
system for cross-compiling for Windows on Linux. But CMake 3.20 was
released this month and fixes the last bug in that area (it had to do
with preprocessing of .rc files), so now I'm unblocked!
CMake is not perfect, but it's better at mkfiles.pl's job than
mkfiles.pl was, and it has the great advantage that lots of other
people already know about it.
Other advantages of the CMake system:
- Easier to build with. At least for the big three platforms, it's
possible to write down a list of build commands that's actually the
same everywhere ("cmake ." followed by "cmake --build ."). There's
endless scope for making your end-user cmake commands more fancy
than that, for various advantages, but very few people _have_ to.
- Less effort required to add a new puzzle. You just add a puzzle()
statement to the top-level CMakeLists.txt, instead of needing to
remember eight separate fiddly things to put in the .R file. (Look
at the reduction in CHECKLST.txt!)
- The 'unfinished' subdirectory is now _built_ unconditionally, even
if the things in it don't go into the 'make install' target. So
they won't bit-rot in future.
- Unix build: unified the old icons makefile with the main build, so
that each puzzle builds without an icon, runs to build its icon,
then relinks with it.
- Windows build: far easier to switch back and forth between debug
and release than with the old makefiles.
- MacOS build: CMake has its own .dmg generator, which is surely
better thought out than my ten-line bodge.
- net reduction in the number of lines of code in the code base. In
fact, that's still true _even_ if you don't count the deletion of
mkfiles.pl itself - that script didn't even have the virtue of
allowing everything else to be done exceptionally concisely.
Each game's .R file should append the binary to $(GAMES) in both the
'am' and 'gtk' makefiles, but presumably due to copy-and-paste from an
out-of-date version, tracks.R only did 'gtk'.
Also clarified CHECKLST.txt in the hope that I won't miss that again.
This should simplify the process of adding a new puzzle, by automating
the part where I have to manually edit index.html separately from the
main build step.
to it giving each game's "internal" name (as seen in the source file,
.R etc) and also a brief description of the game. The idea of the
latter is that it should be usable as a comment field in .desktop
files and similar.
[originally from svn r9858]
web pages for the Java applets. Previously, those have all been
maintained by hand in my website's svn area, which is a bit silly. Now
we have a file per puzzle in the 'html' subdirectory which contains
the puzzle's name, one or two attributes, and the instructions snippet
to go below the puzzle applet; and then there's a Perl script that
builds all the real web pages out of that by adding in the parts
common across all files: the header, footer, and middle fragment with
the <applet> tag and resizing bits and pieces.
One piece _not_ checked in here is the footer text specific to my
hosting at chiark, which I think does still belong in the www area. So
Buildscr doesn't actually build the web pages; it just delivers the
bits and pieces by which my nightly snapshot script will be able to
run the program that _does_ build them, passing that footer as an
extra argument.
[originally from svn r9780]
the web, which I hope will also end up being extended to generate
both Windows and X icons for each individual puzzle. The mechanism
is: for each puzzle there's a save file in the `icons' subdirectory
showing a game state which I think is a decent illustration of the
puzzle, and then there's a nasty set of scripts which runs each
puzzle binary, loads that save file, grabs a screenshot using xwd,
and munges it into shape.
In order to support this I've added two new options (--redo and
--windowid) to all the GTK puzzles, which I don't expect ever to be
used outside the icons makefile. I've also added two more options
(--load and --id) which force a GTK puzzle to treat its command-line
option as a save file or as a game ID respectively (the previous
behaviour was always to guess, and sometimes it guessed wrong).
[originally from svn r7014]
when testing a new game, so here's a new architecture for the Recipe
file. mkfiles.pl now supports several new features:
- an `!include' directive, which accepts wildcards
- += to append to an existing object group definition
- the ability to divert output to an arbitrary file.
So now each puzzle has a `.R' file containing a fragment of Recipe
code describing that puzzle, and the central Recipe does `!include
*.R' to construct the Makefiles. That way, I can keep as many
experimental half-finished puzzles lying around my working directory
as I like, and I won't have to keep reverting Recipe when I check in
any other changes.
As part of this change, list.c is no longer a version-controlled
file; it's now constructed by mkfiles.pl, so that it too can take
advantage of this mechanism.
[originally from svn r6781]
as seen by the back ends from the one implemented by the front end,
and shoved a piece of middleware (drawing.c) in between to permit
interchange of multiple kinds of the latter. I've also added a
number of functions to the drawing API to permit printing as well as
on-screen drawing, and retired print.py in favour of integrated
printing done by means of that API.
The immediate visible change is that print.py is dead, and each
puzzle now does its own printing: where you would previously have
typed `print.py solo 2x3', you now type `solo --print 2x3' and it
should work in much the same way.
Advantages of the new mechanism available right now:
- Map is now printable, because the new print function can make use
of the output from the existing game ID decoder rather than me
having to replicate all those fiddly algorithms in Python.
- the new print functions can cope with non-initial game states,
which means each puzzle supporting --print also supports
--with-solutions.
- there's also a --scale option permitting users to adjust the size
of the printed puzzles.
Advantages which will be available at some point:
- the new API should permit me to implement native printing
mechanisms on Windows and OS X.
[originally from svn r6190]
