Hi everyone,

PasBuild v1.7.0 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 v1.7.0 introduces an external plug-in system, a resolve command for IDE and tooling integration, and activeByDefault module control. Several bug fixes improve multi-module test builds, unit discovery for non-standard source layouts, and resource processing output.

New Features
------------

External Plugin System

PasBuild now supports external plug-ins: standalone executables that extend the build lifecycle with custom goals. Plug-ins are named pasbuild-<goal> and discovered in the project's plugins/ directory, ~/.pasbuild/plugins/, or anywhere on PATH.

Plug-ins declare which build phase they run after via a --pasbuild-phase flag and receive project context through environment variables and the resolve command. Unknown goals are automatically deferred for plugin resolution before reporting an error.

An example plug-in (shell and Pascal implementations) is included under extras/plugins/hello-world/.

Example usage:

pasbuild hello # runs pasbuild-hello plugin
pasbuild --help # lists discovered plugins

Resolve Command (IDE/Tooling Integration)

The new resolve command outputs the fully resolved build configuration as JSON to stdout, without compiling. This includes unit paths, include paths, defines, compiler options, dependencies, and the complete compiler command line.

It supports single-module projects, multi-module
aggregators (outputs all modules), and per-module
selection with -m.

Example usage:

pasbuild resolve # single module
pasbuild resolve # aggregator: all modules pasbuild resolve -m core # specific module

Use cases include IDE integration, plugin development, CI tooling, and debugging build configuration issues.

activeByDefault Module Attribute

Modules listed in an aggregator's <modules> section can now specify activeByDefault="false" to be excluded from normal builds. This is useful for example projects or optional modules in large multi-module repositories.

Two mechanisms override this attribute:

- The --all CLI flag forces all modules to build
regardless of their activeByDefault setting (useful for CI and nightly builds).
- Explicitly selecting a module with -m also overrides the attribute.

Example:

<modules>
<module>core</module>
<module activeByDefault="false">examples</module>
</modules>

Bug Fixes
---------

Multi-Line Unit Declarations in Bootstrap Generator

Units where the 'unit' keyword and the unit name appear on separate lines (common in some FPC codebases such as aggpas units in fpGUI) were not being discovered by the bootstrap generator. ParseUnitName now tracks a
UnitKeyFound flag to handle the name appearing on the next non-empty line.

Thanks to Andrew Haines for reporting this issue.

Test Goals Skip Gracefully When No Test Directory Exists

Modules without a src/test/pascal/ directory previously caused the entire reactor build to fail. Test-compile and test now log an informational message and return success, matching Maven behaviour where a module with no test sources reports SUCCESS in the reactor summary.

Test-Compile Routed Through Reactor for Multi-Module Builds

The test-compile goal was missing from both the
multi-module dispatch and the reactor goal-to-command mapping. This caused test-compile with -m to run against the aggregator directory instead of the selected module, failing with "Source directory not found".

Module Dependency Paths Included in Test-Compile

Test compilation failed when test units referenced units from module dependencies because BuildTestCompilerCommand omitted ResolvedModulePaths. The same -Fu loop from the compile command is now applied to test-compile.

Conditional Unit Paths Resolved Relative to Source Directory

Conditional paths from <unitPaths> were added as -Fu flags without prepending the base source directory, producing incorrect compiler arguments in auto-scan mode. Paths are now resolved relative to the configured source directory.

XML Escaping in Init-Generated project.xml

User input containing <, >, or & characters (e.g. an author field with an email address in angle brackets) produced invalid XML. All user-provided values are now escaped with XML entities before being written.

Thanks to Frank Fischer for reporting this issue.

Resource Processing Output Respects Verbose Flag

The per-file "Copied:" and "Filtered:" log lines during resource processing could produce excessive output for projects with many resource files. These lines now require the -v flag. The verbose flag is also propagated from parent commands to their dependencies.

Changes
-------

CLI Refactoring

Build goals and certain arguments are now refactored and better separated in code logic.

Quiet Mode for Resolve Output

The resolve command suppresses all [INFO] log lines to ensure only machine-consumable JSON appears on stdout.

Test Suite
----------

63 new test cases added in this release:
Total test count: 209 (up from 146 in v1.6.0)

PasBuild is free software released under the BSD-3-Clause license.

Regards,
- Graeme -