Changelog

All notable changes to Alien::Xmake will be documented in this file.

The format is based on Keep a Changelog, and this project adheres to Semantic Versioning.

v0.9.0 - 2026-09-01

The docs have been greatly expanded since January but the stars of this release are Alien::Xrepo and Alien::Xrepo::Base, an Alien::Base stand-in for installing tools and libraries from xrepo, vcpkg, conan, brew (homebrew/linuxbrew), conda, dub (Dlang libs), pacman (if you use arch, btw) clib, apt on Debian/Ubuntu, Cargo for Rust crates, Portage on Gentoo, Nimble for nimlang, NuGet for .NET, Zypper on openSUSE, and even your own custom repositories with smart prerequisite management in just a few lines of Perl.

Changed

• We install the latest tagged release of xmake rather than hardcoding a version. If the system install is older, we leave it alone and create a local install in our dir.

Fixed

• Alien::Xrepo shouldn't choke when xrepo sends chatter to STDOUT like the compiler probe before the actual JSON we're looking for

Added

• Alien::Xrepo::Base.
• New examples:
  • eg/webui.pl wraps webUI for fast, local, browser based GUIs
  • eg/nuklear/ builds the header-only Nuklear GUI library via xmake into a shared library (GDI backend on Windows, Xlib on Unix) and uses Affix to wrap that lib
  • eg/repo_features.pl is a feature tour covering third-party package manager support (vcpkg::, conan::, brew::, pacman::, dub::, ...) and creation of dependency graphs (info( ..., depgraph => 1, format => 'dot' ) for Graphviz
  • eg/xrepo_inline_c.pl an Inline::C walkthrough for downloading and linking libpng and zlib
  • eg/xrepo_binary.pl demonstrates using xrepo to install and run binaries; in this case ninja
  • Two example CPAN-style dists under eg/examples/ demonstrating how to build a thin Alien:: module on Alien::Xrepo::Base:
    • Alien-Zstandard: a runnable example with three demo scripts (Affix, Affix with compression, and FFI::Platypus) and unit tests; installed via xrepo as the zstd package
    • Alien-Lsquic: the plumbing for a heavy lsquic install with unit tests
• Automatic confirmation for xmake/xrepo prompts: both Alien::Xmake and Alien::Xrepo accept new constructor options yes and confirm with per-call yes/confirm overrides.
• Full coverage of xrepo actions in Alien::Xrepo
  • fetch returns parsed package info (or raw --cflags/--ldflags) without reinstalling
  • info supports --depgraph and --format=json
  • scan lists installed packages (optional lua-pattern filter)
  • download fetches package source archives
  • import_pkg / export handle offline package distribution
  • list_repo lists configured remote repositories
  • env sets up a package environment and runs a program (or --show it)
  • search supports --addon
  • uninstall supports --all and --force
  • _build_args now understands jobs, force/shallow/build, VS/NDK/SDK/MingW toolchain switches, and --toolchain_host
• Full coverage of xmake actions and plugins in Alien::Xmake
  • New constructor option verbose to echo commands as they run
  • Actions: build, clean, create, configure, global, install, uninstall, package, pack, require, run, test, update, service, addon
  • Plugins: check, doxygen, format, lua, macro, project, repo, show, watch
  • Generic escape hatch task( $name, %options ) for tasks without a dedicated method
  • show strips ANSI codes, splits listings, and decodes --format=json into a data structure
  • The xmake f-style config switches are mapped to options like plat, arch, mode, kind, vs, ndk, mingw, sdk, toolchain, ... (plus a set hash for any --key=value)
  • global gets only the config keys xmake actually accepts there (vs, ndk, qt, ...)
  • Version-build accessor renamed build() to buildid() so build is the build action; the xmake config action is exposed as configure() to keep config( $key )` as the install-time data accessor
• New installdir/cachedir options to force a project-local package store (via XMAKE_PKG_INSTALLDIR / XMAKE_PKG_CACHEDIR) for reproducible, isolated builds
• ::PackageInfo gains...
  • an installdir accessor (from fetch artifacts.installdir, else derived from the first libfile/include dir) and bin_dir falls back to <installdir>/bin, so tool packages (ninja, python, ...) can be installed and run as binaries
  • a kind accessor (library vs binary), surfaced by print/dump/_data_printer
• Alien::Xrepo->new( root => $dir ) becomes the default installdir for every store-touching method, so one install call can run against a project-local store; used by Alien::Xrepo::Base
• Alien::Xrepo POD now describes binary/tool installs and not just shared libs for FFI
• New theme constructor option (default plain) so xmake/xrepo output carries no ANSI color codes; passed as $ENV{XMAKE_THEME} on every store-touching method, overridable per-call with theme => ...

0.08 - 2026-01-11

Changed

• Don't bother with making sure we can install a lib on CPAN smokers. I can't diagnose a system I have no access to.

0.07 - 2026-01-09

Changed

• Switch xmake to plain text mode on CPAN smokers

0.06 - 2026-01-07

Added

• Support system installs on Windows
• Expose xrepo
• Demos in eg/
  • eg/xmake_demo.pl creates and builds a simple shared library in C
  • eg/xrepo_demo.pl queries for zlib's info, installs it locally, and spews the flags required to build against it

Changed

• Bump to Xmake 3.0.6

0.05 - 2024-03-18

Fixed

• Resort to git when we fail to download snapshot with HTTP::Tiny (kinda pointless but the code was already there)

0.04 - 2024-03-17

Changed

• Install v2.8.8 on platforms that build from source
• Pull tarball instead of git clone on platforms that build from source

0.03 - 2024-03-17

Changed

• Install v2.8.8 on Windows

0.02 - 2024-03-17

Changed

• Minor documentation changes
• Move to Test2::V0

0.01 - 2023-10-02

Changed

• It exists.