Build system
This documentation is not needed for end users. Only the people of the development team, who must maintain the build system need to read this.
In this document we want to describe our build system for MOOSE. MOOSE consists of multiple Lua files. Each class is stored in its own file. This is needed for MOOSE developers to maintain clarity. For users this is not practical, because they want to include the whole framework as a single file into their missions.
Because of this the build will collect all needed files and merge them together
in one file with the name Moose.lua. It includes also all comments and the
class documentation. Because of this its size is about 6-7 MB.
To reduce the size of the file and make mission files smaller, the Moose team
decided to create a version without all comments and documentation. This file
is named Moose_.lua. It is created by a tool with the name LuaSrcDiet.
Both files will be called static includes. In other programming languages includes are dependencies. For Moose it is easier to memorize, that these files must be included in your mission to use Moose. It is an static approach because you need to add it once and it is only read from inside of the mission file after that. A dynamic approach is to load all the single class files on each mission start from the hard disk. But this is more for advanced Moose users and Moose developers.
Details
In the past AppVeyor was used to run the build on a Windows system. We decided to migrate this build to GitHub Actions. Installation of dependencies was not stable on Windows with GitHub Actions. So we switched to Ubuntu Linux.
GitHub Actions yml files
The build configuration is stored in the folder .github/workflows. You will find
multiple files in this directory:
- build-docs.yml - Job definition to generate the class documentation
- build-includes.yml - Job definition to build the static includes
- gh-pages.yml - Job to build this documentation page
We decided to use different files for each job for separation of duties and easier maintenance.