Hi everyone,
PasBuild v1.6.0 has been released.
PasBuild is a Maven-inspired build automation tool for Free Pascal projects. It provides convention-based project structure, dependency management, multi-module builds, resource filtering, and packaging.
Homepage:
https://github.com/graemeg/pasbuild
Quick Start Guide:
https://github.com/graemeg/PasBuild/blob/master/docs/quick-start-guide.adoc
Overview For This Release
-------------------------
PasBuild v1.6.0 brings nested aggregator support, a configurable source directory, platform-qualified release archives, and several bug fixes. Multi-module projects can now organise modules into groups using nested POM aggregators to arbitrary depth, and the -m flag correctly expands aggregator selections following Maven 4 semantics. A new <sourceDirectory> element lets lightweight projects skip the full standard directory layout entirely.
New Features
------------
Nested Aggregator Support
Multi-module projects can now contain aggregator modules that themselves contain further modules, to arbitrary depth. This is ideal for grouping related modules such as examples or plugins under a single sub-aggregator.
Example structure:
my-framework/ # Root aggregator (pom) +-- project.xml
+-- core/ # Library module
+-- examples/ # Nested aggregator (pom) | +-- project.xml
| +-- demo1/ # Application module
| +-- demo2/ # Application module
Key behaviours:
- Recursive discovery walks <modules> trees to produce a single flat registry for topological sorting.
- Version inheritance chains through all aggregator levels.
- Cycle detection prevents circular aggregator references.
- POM modules appear in the reactor summary but are skipped during compilation.
Example usage:
pasbuild compile # Builds all leaf modules pasbuild compile -m examples # Builds examples + deps
Configurable Source Directory
Projects can now override the default src/main/pascal/ source directory by adding <sourceDirectory> to the <build> section of project.xml. This is particularly useful for small example projects where the full standard layout would be unnecessarily verbose.
Example:
<build>
<mainSource>Demo.pas</mainSource>
<sourceDirectory>.</sourceDirectory>
</build>
Common values:
. Source files in the project root
pascal Source files in a pascal/ subdirectory src Source files in a src/ subdirectory (omitted) Defaults to src/main/pascal
All internal paths (compiler search paths, unit scanning, include file discovery, bootstrap generation) honour the configured source directory.
Platform-Qualified Release Archives
The package goal now produces archive filenames that include the target platform, allowing release archives for different platforms to coexist without name collisions.
Old: pasbuild-1.5.0.zip
New: pasbuild-1.6.0-x86_64-linux.zip
The suffix uses the CPU and OS components of the FPC target triplet. The FPC version is intentionally omitted as it is not relevant to end users downloading a binary release.
Bug Fixes
---------
Module Selection Expands Aggregators (Maven 4 Behaviour)
The -m flag now correctly handles nested aggregator modules. When the selected module has packaging=pom, the build automatically expands to include all child modules under that aggregator plus their transitive dependencies.
Previously, the filter naively included all modules that appeared earlier in the topological sort, pulling in unrelated modules. The fix also properly excludes modules that are not dependencies of the selected target.
The filter logic has been moved from TReactorCommand to TModuleRegistry.FilterBuildOrder for testability.
Correct ExitCode Reporting in ExecuteProcessWithCapture
Fixed a bug where ExecuteProcessWithCapture could report a zero exit code for processes that actually failed. The issue was caused by FPC applying WEXITSTATUS twice when WaitOnExit was called explicitly after draining the pipe, converting non-zero exit codes to zero.
Changes
-------
Release Profile Strips Debug Symbols
The release profile now includes -Xs (strip all debug symbols) alongside the existing -XX flag, producing smaller release binaries.
Test Suite
----------
26 new test cases added in this release:
- 10 tests for nested aggregator discovery (two-level, three-level, version inheritance, cycle detection, cross-level dependencies, build order)
- 5 tests for build order filtering (transitive dependency selection, aggregator expansion, unrelated module
exclusion)
- 4 tests for platform suffix generation
- 3 tests for <sourceDirectory> parsing
- 1 test fix for ExitCode reporting
- 3 tests for existing nested discovery fixtures
Total test count: 146 (up from 120 in v1.5.0)
PasBuild is free software released under the BSD-3-Clause license.
Regards,
- Graeme -