An Infrastructure for Composing Build Systems of Software Product Lines

Deriving a product from a software product line may require various build tasks, such as model transformations, source code generation, preprocessing, compiling, as well as linking and packaging the compiled sources. Usually implemented using simple scripting languages, such as Apache ant or GNU make, build systems tend to become monolithic entities, which are intricate to adapt and maintain. This makes developing the build system for a multi-product-line, which is composed of several sub-product-lines and maybe other configurable components, particularly challenging. Several, previously independent build systems- possibly implemented using different build tools (ant, make, etc.)-need to be integrated. In this paper, we approach this by using models to describe the involved build tasks (including their input and output parameters) as well as their composition. An interpreter evaluates the models and executes the tasks in the composed order with the configured parameters to produce the final product. Our approach enables the interaction of build systems implemented with different tools with only little development effort, whereas the build order and parameter flow is made explicit in the models. We have started to apply our tooling to model the build system of two multi-product-lines, where it reveals sufficient expressiveness and clarifies the build system interaction.