Mini-Module Facility

Mini-Module Facility

The Mini Module facility provides a lightweight and easy to use mechanism for compiling and loading module files. The facility keeps track of the dependencies between modules and the modules that have been compiled and loaded. The Mini Module facility was designed for simplicity and portability, yet it is powerful enough to manage substantial software projects, each operating on multiple hardware platforms and Common Lisp implementations.

The Mini Module facility is sufficient for many situations, and if not, there are more complex open-source defsystem packages, such as ASDF (http://constantly.at/lisp/asdf/), that are available.

The :mini-module module is automatically loaded by the GBBopen <install-directory>/startup.lisp file (via the mini-module-loader.lisp file located in the mini-module subdirectory). If a gbbopen-init.lisp file (source or compiled) is present in the user's “home” directory, it is loaded immediately following the loading of the Mini Module facility by the <install-directory>/startup.lisp file. A personal <homedir>/gbbopen-init.lisp file is very useful for defining GBBopen parameters and other personalizations (see the GBBopen start-up description).

Stand-alone usage

To bootstrap the Mini Module facility stand-alone (separate from the GBBopen Project software tree), do the following:

• create a “root” directory to contain the mini-module software tree
  (for example: $ mkdir my-tree)
• create the mini-module portion of the source tree in the newly created “root” directory
  (for example: $ cd my-tree ; mkdir -p source/mini-module)
• copy the mini-module-loader.lisp,   mini-module.lisp,   and mini-module-user.lisp files into the
  source/mini-module directory
• start your Common Lisp implementation and then load the mini-module-loader.lisp file
     > (load "my-tree/source/mini-module/mini-module-loader")
• compile the :mini-module and :mini-module-user modules:
     > (mini-module:compile-module :mini-module-user :create-dirs :propagate)

Entities

• *automatically-create-missing-directories*
• *autorun-modules*
• *patches-only*
• compile-module
• continue-patch
• define-module
• define-relative-directory
• define-root-directory
• describe-module
• describe-patches
• finish-patch
• get-directory
• get-patch-description
• get-root-directory
• load-module
• load-module-file
• module-directories
• module-loaded-p
• patch
• patch-loaded-p
• show-defined-directories
• start-patch
• with-module-redefinitions

Mini-Module Facility