Build DOG form source - Wed, Jun 19, 2024

A guide for contributors

Prerequisites

First and only dependency is Borland C++ 3.1. Why this compiler and version? It’s simply because that’s what I had when I first started developing DOG. Also I quite like Borland software nowadays, though I didn’t have any back in the 90s. :)

Older version of DOG could be built with e.g. Turbo C 2.01, however it’s no longer true since I moved to a Makefile based build mechanism. Currently there are no plans to support Turbo C in the future. Instead I will work on supporting OpenWatcom or IA-16 GCC in the future.

Building

DOG source tree has this structure:

dog
├── bin
├── doc
└── src
    ├── ext
    └── util

/dog/

The dog directory contains the base Makefile. This Makefile is mainly used to build the release versions of DOG with the bindist and srcdist targets. For development you will probably want to build from the src directory.

/dog/bin/

The dog/bin directory is where the binaries are copied to when you use the install target. It also contains a few sample dogfiles. This directory is what’s the main content of the binary release zip file.

/dog/src/

The dog/doc directory contains just som documentation.

The dog/src directory is where you can find source code of DOG.COM. The source started out as a single dog.c file, and then I broke out some other parts, but used an #include to still have all the source in a single file from the compilers point of view. After migrating to make, each *.c file is built into an object file and then they are all linked together to make DOG.COM.

The Makefile in this directory has several useful targets and you can also use some defines to enable full or partial debuggin printfs. The main target is naturally dog, other words just type make dog on the command line to build the DOG.COM binary. You can also build the external commands and utilities by using the ext and util targets.

The all target target will build ext, util and dog. To build an object file you can simply build the obj target e.g. make alse.obj. This can be handy in case you want to build one component with debug defines.

These debug defines are pre-defined in the Makefile, you can add more to meet your needs:

Additionally there is -DWARN to build with all warnings on treated as errors.

/dog/src/ext/

The dog/src/ext directory contains all the external commands. Each external command is self-contained in a single source file. However I’m considering merging common functions into an ext library. But for now it doesn’t exist. To build a command simply use the command as a target: e.g. make ls will build ls.c to LS.COM.

/dog/src/util/

The dog/src/util directory is similar to the dog/src/ext directory in that each command is its own C file. The programs however are mostly used for developing and testing DOG, and are not really of use to end users. See the Makefile for the targets, or simply use make all

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