Developer.md

Notes for developing BSD Owl Scripts

A nice feature of BSD Owl Scripts is its developer subshell. At the root directory of any package which is developed with BSD Owl Scripts the special command

% make subshell

starts a developer subshell, it is a shell whose environment has been adjusted so that BSD Make and BSD Owl Scripts still can find the root directory of the package, its configuration, specific Makefiles and a lot of other files.

This subshell is handy to work on a single module of the package. It is also customary to open several developer subshells, one visiting a module and another visiting the corresponding tests.

Taking advantage of the developer subshell functionality requires to work in a sanitised environment. It is mandatory that your ~/.profile or your ~/.cshrc do not prepend the path to a BSD Owl Script installation to MAKEFLAGS. So, for instance, the Bourne profile snippet

MAKEFLAGS="${MAKEFLAGS}${MAKEFLAGS:+ }-I ${HOME}/share/mk"
export MAKEFLAGS

is safe, even if you installed BSD Owl Scripts in ${HOME}/share/mk, but the snippet

MAKEFLAGS="-I ${HOME}/share/mk${MAKEFLAGS:+ }${MAKEFLAGS}"
export MAKEFLAGS

is not safe, because BSD Owl Scripts files in ${HOME}/share/mk will shadow those in your working copy.