• RELEASE NOTES
• LIBRARY CONTENTS
• INSTALLATION
• BUILDING THE EXAMPLES
• ENVIRONMENT VARIABLES MANAGEMENT
• USING THE EIFFEL LOOP SCONS BUILD SYSTEM
• EXAMPLE APPLICATIONS
• SOURCE TREE DESCRIPTIONS

doc/Release-20.1.1.md (future)

doc/Release-20.1.0.md (current)

doc/Release-1.4.7.md

doc/Release-1.4.6.md

doc/Release-1.4.5.md

doc/Release-1.4.4.md

doc/Release-1.4.3.md

doc/Release-1.4.2.md

doc/Release-1.4.1.md

doc/Release-1.4.0.md

doc/Release-1.3.4.md

doc/Release-1.3.3.md

doc/Release-1.3.2.md

doc/Release-1.2.6.md

For a short description of each module see doc/Contents.md or www.eiffel-loop.com.

EiffelStudio 16.05 It will take considerable work to migrate Eiffel-Loop to EiffelStudio 19.05 and beyond. Unfortunately Finnian has to prioritize making his Matryohska project a commercial success before undertaking a migration of Eiffel-Loop to 19.05.

• Variables ISE_PLATFORM, ISE_EIFFEL and ISE_C_COMPILER should be defined. The estudio command must be in your path.
• Python 2.6.x or 2.7.x. Versions >= 3.0 are not compatible with the scons builder. The python command must be in your path.

• Microsoft Windows SDK for Windows 7.
• Using the eiffel2python library requires the header files and libraries from the 64-bit version of Python when compiling with the 64-bit version of EiffelStudio. Similarly for 32-bit compilations. This is a precondition for compiling the test.ecf project.

• Use a "manual install" of EiffelStudio and not the Debian package. The Debian package installs library files in odd places causing C compilation errors with Eiffel-Loop.

Unzip the Eiffel-Loop archive to a development directory and then open a terminal window. Change to the Eiffel-Loop home directory and run the setup script. For Unix the command is:

. setup.sh

And for Windows:

setup

Note that for Windows 7/Vista you should open the terminal console with administrator permissions.

The script achieves the following things.

1. Installs extensions to scons for building Eiffel projects.
2. Installs scons if it is not already installed.
3. Installs Python package lxml if not already installed.
4. Builds the Eiffel toolkit program el_toolkit, which amongst other things, can convert Pyxis files to XML and vice-versa.
5. If the gedit text editor is installed, syntax highlighting support for Pyxis Eiffel Configuration files and generic Pyxis files is installed.
6. A bonus for Windows:
   • gedit is associated with .pecf files
   • The Pyxis converter program is associated with .pecf files and accessible from an entry in the right-click context menu, Convert to ECF.

Open a terminal console and change to the project directory. Use this command to do a finalized build.

scons project=[PROJECT NAME] action=finalize

Note that you can refer to the Eiffel project file using either the .ecf or pecf file extension. In the case of a pecf file, it is first converted to .ecf format as part of the build.

The output from the build can be found in this directory under the project directory:

package/$ISE_PLATFORM/bin

Before the examples can be opened in EiffelStudio, it is first necessary to build any C or Java dependencies using a scons build. To do this, open a terminal console and change to the project directory. Use this command to build a W_code project for use in EiffelStudio.

scons project=[PROJECT NAME] action=freeze

Note that you can refer to the Eiffel project file using either the .ecf or .pecf file extension. In the case of a .pecf file, it is first converted to .ecf format as part of the build.

After the build completes use the following command to open the project in EiffelStudio.

launch_estudio [PROJECT NAME]

As with the scons command, you can use either the .ecf or .pecf project file. The launch_estudio command sets up the correct environment for the project.

The following command line utilities must be in your path:

tar, gpg, gzip

A selection of command line tools for use with the Rhythmbox audio player. Requirements -create_cortina_set option The following command line utilities must be in your path:

avconv, lame, sox

Eiffel-Loop has a system for automatically setting environment variables for a project, either when you open it in EiffelStudio using the launch_estudio command, or when building it on the command line using the Eiffel-Loop scons based build system.

The environment manager assumes that your Eiffel development directory has a structure like the following:

|-- Eiffel
|   |-- library
|   |   |-- Eiffel-Loop
|   |   |-- eGMP
|   |   |-- eposix-3.2.1
|   |   |-- log4e
|   |   `-- and so forth..
|   |-- project-1
|   |-- project-2
|   |-- project-3
|   |-- and so forth..

The development root is either a directory path that ends with the step name Eiffel, or else is a path defined by an environment variable EIFFEL. The manager assumes that there is a directory named library in your Eiffel root directory containing all third party Eiffel libraries. It then creates environment variables based on the directory names in library, but ignoring any version numbers. So for example if it finds a directory eposix-3.2.1 it will add an evironment path variable EPOSIX. The names are uppercased and any hyphens are substituted with an underscore so Eiffel-Loop becomes EIFFEL_LOOP.

In addition it adds valid values for these variables: JDK_HOME, PYTHON_HOME, PYTHON_LIB_NAME as well as the following Eiffel-Loop variables:

EL_CONTRIB = $EIFFEL_LOOP/contrib
EL_C_LIB = $EIFFEL_LOOP/C_library

However you can override the defaults or add your own environment variables by creating a project.py file in your project directory and calling the procedure set_environ. Infact you need this file anyway to use the build system or the launch_estudio command. Here is an example that sets the LD_LIBRARY_PATH variable. You can use any valid Python 2.7 code in the project.py file.

# EiffelStudio project environment

from eiffel_loop.eiffel.dev_environ import *

version = (1, 0, 4); build = 223

installation_sub_directory = 'Eiffel-Loop/test'

set_environ ('LD_LIBRARY_PATH', "$EL_C_LIB/svg-graphics/spec/$ISE_PLATFORM")

To understand how the default environment is constructed, read the source text of the following Python modules found in: Eiffel-Loop/tool/python-support:

eiffel_loop.eiffel.project
eiffel_loop.os.environ
eiffel_loop.project

If you make any modifications you can activate them by running the Eiffel-Loop setup script again, or adding Eiffel-Loop/tool/python-support to the PYTHONPATH variable.

During setup, a Python package called eiffel_loop is installed. This contains extensions to scons for building Eiffel systems.The source code can be found in:

Eiffel-Loop/tool/python-support

Features of this build system are as follows:

• Cross compilation.
• Managing of resource files and shareable object dependencies to create installable packages.
• Ability to download and extract prebuilt binaries from zip files using special source files with extension *.get*. The second asterisk corresponds to target extensions like dll, def, jar and so forth. They are managed in the same way as C source files. The binaries could be any kind of shareable objects including Java jars.
• Generates Eiffel source file with build version information available. This is accessed through once variable: {EL_MODULE_BUILD_INFO}.Build_info.

Each project can have two equivalent Eiffel configuration files. One is in the standard ECF XML format. The other is in the more readable Pyxis format and has the extension .pecf. Either file can be used to build the project or open it in EiffelStudio. Use the following commands to convert from one to the other:

el_toolkit -xml_to_pyxis -in [CONFIGURATION FILE]

el_toolkit -pyxis_to_xml -in [CONFIGURATION FILE]

el_toolkit -ecf_to_pecf -library_tree [DIRECTORY PATH]

This file is a Python script and is used to override default values for various environment variables and compile options for the scons build. The following variables can be set.

• major_version: set major version number. This variable will appear in the Eiffel BUILD_INFO class.
• minor_version: set minor version number. This variable will appear in the Eiffel BUILD_INFO class.
• installation_sub_directory: set installation path for application relative to /opt in Unix and %ProgramFiles% in Windows. It doesn't matter whether you use the Windows or Unix path separator. This variable will appear in the Eiffel BUILD_INFO class.
• environ: this dictionary object defines the build shell environment. See section Build Environment for details.
• MSC_options: This sequence object contains options for the Microsoft C compiler. See section Microsoft C options.

This is a file that the scons builder looks for in order to build a project. For Eiffel projects it contains the single line:

import eiffel_loop.eiffel.SConstruct

To configure the Microsoft C compiler environment, edit the MSC_options variable in the project.py. Essentially these are arguments for the SetEnv.cmd command line tool.

By default MSC_options has the following values.

MSC_options = ['/x64', '/xp' '/Release']

Note: if you set the cpu architecture option to be /x86, the 32bit version of EiffelStudio will be launched to compile the project. However if all you want to do is change the cpu architecture, it is better to do it with the cpu= command option for scons or launch_estudio. For example:

scons cpu=x86 project=[PROJECT NAME] action=finalize

More about this in the Cross Compilation section.

The eiffel_loop scons builder supports cross compilation. This feature is fully operational on Windows and partially completed under Unix. When doing finalized builds, an intermediate target is built under the build directory:

build/F_code.tar.gz

This is a platform neutral archive of the generated C code under EIFGENS/classic/F_code. From this the final target is built in the package/$ISE_PLATFORM/bin directory. In Windows you can build a 64 bit binary of your application and then build a 32 bit version without having to do an Eiffel compilation. The 32 bit version is built with the command:

scons cpu=x86 project=[PROJECT NAME] action=finalize

To do cross compilation you must have a 64bit and a 32 bit version of EiffelStudio installed under these directories respectively.

C:\Program files C:\Program files x86

If you wish to use the eiffel2python library, you need to have both the 64 bit and 32 bit version of Python installed.

To simplify development, Eiffel-Loop has the concept of a multi-mode "Swiss Army Knife" application. Each individual sub-application inherits from class EL_SUB_APPLICATION, and the command line option is found by looking at the value implemented of attribute 'option_name'. When calling the application, this option name should be specified on the command line immediately after the executable command name.

- [-logging]

Should the need arise for a more compact executable, it should be technically possible to designate each sub-application as the root class for an Eiffel project. Are alternatively just comment out the other sub-applications in the root manifest.

Each project has a class APPLICATION_ROOT which inherits from EL_MULTI_APPLICATION_ROOT, and contains a manifest of all available sub-applications.

class
   APPLICATION_ROOT

inherit
   EL_MULTI_APPLICATION_ROOT [BUILD_INFO]

create
   make

feature {NONE} -- Implementation

	Application_types: TUPLE [
      MY_FIRST_APP,
      MY_SECOND_APP
	]
     once
        create Result
     end
end

Each sub-application has a minimum amount of terse log output. This output can be expanded with the addition of the -logging switch on the command line.