About PMK

What is PMK:

The Pre Make Kit project is a toolkit providing a collection of tools aimed to ease a lot of stages in project development. It provides a scanner that generates template source components such as configuration file or makefile. It also provides a dependency checker that sets up templates files depending on the system components (such as auto* tools or similar projects). For portability purpose, a BSD like install program is also part of the kit.

The project aims the following goals:

• Opensource (BSD licensed).
• Portability (ISO C, POSIX, compatibility layer).
• Simplicity of use (generation tools, few basic instructions).
• Speed and memory lighweight (compiled C binaries).
• Security (replace scripts by data files, priviledge separation).
• Dependency low cost (only needs a POSIX shell and a C compiler).

Features:

• Dependency checking (with partial autconf compatibility mode).
• Compiler detection to set shared library flags.
• Architecture and cpu identification (support for x86 32 and 64 bits, IA64 and alpha).
• Internal pkg-config support (faster than calling pkg-config).
• Use a data file instead of a shell script that could hide trojans.

Tools:

• Gathering tool for static data: pmksetup
• Dependency configuration tool: pmk
• Sources scanner generating templates: pmkscan
• BSD compatible install: pmkinstall
• Package meta information tool (pkg-config like) : pmkpc

Status:

Currently the project is stable.

• Both pmk and pmksetup engines are functional.
• We have completed the pmkinstall features.
• Standard checks are included and basic data is gathered.
• Packages are available in download section.

History:

Historically, it started as an alternative to GNU Autoconf for POSIX platforms. Later, some other tools have been added to the project which became a kind of development kit.

The idea was roaming in project's founder mind since a long time and it really started in march 2003. At the beginning, pmk was first named premake but this name was already used by another project. While registering the project on SourceForge we found that pmk was already used by another project named "Distributed Build Tools". As this project was not mainly named "pmk" then it was decided to keep the name. Since that time we recovered the pmk project on sourceforge.

Forum:

The #pmk channel has been created on the freenode IRC network. Both english and french languages are spoken. Feel free to meet us ;)

Authors:

• Damien Couderc <mipsator@users.sourceforge.net> - Lead Developer
• Xavier Santolaria <xsa@users.sourceforge.net> - Developer
• Martin Reindl <mreindl@users.sourceforge.net> - Developer