Dependencies

Your mulle-objc project will have dependencies. One dependency is either the MulleObjC library or the Foundation library and their constituent libraries. But you will likely want to add more.

The modern workflow makes this easy and in the best case a one-liner. Here’s how.

mulle-sde dependency manages the sourcetree

All dependencies are managed via a sourcetree. If you have created a mulle-sde project as described previously, you can look at the pre-defined sourcetree with mulle-sde dependency list or mulle-sourcetree list (use -l -u for more detail).

address
-------
Foundation
Foundation-startup

These dependencies again can be mulle-sde and non mulle-sde projects. Each mulle-sde project in turn may have its own sourcetree with dependencies. So you can see where this is heading…

Add a repository from github

When adding a third-party repository, the first thing to decide is, if it is a C or an Objective-C repository. At this point in time C is more likely, so we will go with that first.

For github repositories there is a special syntax available, so you don’t have to type in the whole URL. This command adds https://github.com/libexpat/libexpat to your project:

C:

mulle-sde dependency add --c --github libexpat libexpat

This command adds https://github.com/MulleWeb/MulleZlib to your project:

Objective-C:

mulle-sde dependency add --objc --github MulleWeb MulleZlib

Get build commands for free

libexpat is special, in that there is a craftinfo available for it. Many libraries can be built without a craftinfo, but for some libraries like libexpat a few tweaks are desirable. The craftinfo contains these tweaks.

You can look at the craftinfo site to see what is available.

If you have a craftinfo, that you would like to share, you are very welcome to contribute this craftinfo.

Header and link commands are automatically created

mulle-sde reflect will reflect the contents of the sourcetree into cmake files residing under ./cmake and into header files residing under ./src. This means you will not have to write any #include statements or add link commands to your project. As dependencies are recursive, you also won’t have to figure out against which system library to link.

Fix a missing include

Often mulle-sde can not guess the correct name and location of the central include header of a dependency correctly. This can be rectified with:

mulle-sde dependency set libexpat include "expat.h"
mulle-sde reflect

Fix a missing library

More rarely a library can not be found, because the name differs from the project. Fix this with:

mulle-sde dependency set libexpat aliases eXpat
mulle-sde reflect

Remove dependency

Removing a dependency again is as easy as typing mulle-sde dependency remove libexpat and letting mulle-sde reflect reflect the changes back into cmake and header files.

Next

A more detailed look at how a mulle-sde project deals with header sources.