Blade Unified Construction Collection
=======================================

Updated from https://github.com/chen3feng/typhoon-blade

Overview
-----------------------------

Blade is designed to be a distributed unified building
system. It is powerful and easy to use. It supports
building mulitiple languages, such as c/c++, Java, protobuf
and swig etc. It analyzes the target dependency automatically
and integrates compiling and linking, testing(incremental
testing and parallel testing), static code inspection functions
together. It aims to improve the clarity and simplicity of the
building rules for a project.

Requirements for End Users
-----------------------------

Blade is designed to have fairly minimal requirements
to build your projects, but there are some. Currently we
only support Linux. We will also make our best effort to
support other platforms (e.g. Solaris, Windows).
However, since core members of the Blade project have no
access to these platforms, it may have outstanding issues
there. If you notice any problems on your platform, please
notify michaelpeng@tencent.com or phongchen@tencent.com.
Patches for fixing them are even more welcome!

### Linux requirements ###
These are the basic requirements to use Blade as a source
package.

    * GNU Complier Collection (required)
    * Scons v2.0 or newer (required)
    * Python v2.6 or newer (required)
    * Ccache v3.1 or newer (optional)

If you want to make Blade to have the capability to build
every target it supports, these are the prerequisites.

    * swig v2.0 or newer (required for swig_library)
    * flex v2.5 or newer (required for lex_yacc)
    * bison v2.1 or newer (required for lex_yacc)

Requirements for Contributor
-----------------------------

We welcome patches. If you plan to contribute a patch,
you need to develop and test your patch from (SVN) checkout.
You need to have this requirement to develop. Blade is
written in python.

    * Python version 2.6 or newer (python 3.0 or newer excluded)

Getting the source
-----------------------------

You can directly check out the source from our Subversion (SVN)
repository. The SVN checkout requires a few extra steps and some
extra software packages on your system, but lets you track the
latest development and make patches much more easily, so we
highly encourage it.

### Source Package ###

    Blade is released in versioned source packages which is
    located at this site [1].

    [1] https://github.com/chen3feng/typhoon-blade

Setting up the collection
-----------------------------

End users or developers need to execute the install script to
intall Blade into current user environment. Please make sure
that ~/bin is in your PATH environment variable. We establish
several symbolic links that enable you to execute blade command.

Reference
-----------------------------
    [1] https://github.com/chen3feng/typhoon-blade
    [2] user manual is inside the package
    [3] developer manual is inside the package

Happy testing!