Firtool Resolver and LLVM Firtool Native

Firtool Resolver is a Scala library and command-line application for downloading LLVM Firtool as a Maven artifact. LLVM Firtool Native is a project to distribute LLVM Firtool as Maven artifacts.

Firtool Native Dependency Distribution Specification (FNDDS)

This specification follows Semantic Versioning 2.0.0.

Specification version: 1.0.0

1. Platforms are defined to be a tuple of a operating system and an architecture written as <os>-<arch> which can also be written as <platform>.
2. The defined operating systems are linux, windows, and macos.
3. The defined architectures are x64 and aarch64.
4. A Project SHALL have a groupId, artifactId, and version.
5. A Project MAY support any number of Platforms.
6. Artifacts SHALL be published as a Maven Artifact
   1. The Maven Artifact groupId SHALL be the same as the project groupId.
   2. The Maven Artifact artifactId SHALL be the project artifactId.
   3. The Maven Artifact version SHALL be the project version and MAY include a suffix starting with -.
   4. The Maven Artifact MAY include additional jars distinguished by classifiers corresponding to supported Platforms.
7. The Maven Artifact SHALL contain a baseDirectory defined to be <groupId>/<artifactId>.
8. The Maven Artifact SHALL contain one or more artifactDirectories defined to be <baseDirectory>/<platform> (for each supported Platform).
9. The baseDirectory SHALL contain a file called FNDDS.version containing only the version of this specification adhered to by the artifact, encoded using UTF-8.
10. The baseDirectory SHALL contain a file called project.version containing only the version of the artifact, encoded using UTF-8.
11. Maven Artifacts published for various Platforms for a single Artifact must conform to the same FNDDS.version and project.version.
12. The artifactDirectory for each supported Platform MAY contain any other project-specific files including executables compiled for the specific <platform>.

Revision History

1.0.0

Initial Version

Commentary on the specification

The purpose of this specification is to enable distributing native executables (especially Firtool) as standard Maven artifacts. It is indended to help bridge the gap between the cross-platform flexibility of JVM applications with the platform-specific requirements of native executables. As such, it is important that executables for different platforms can co-exist on the same Java classpath so that JVM applications may be distributed with a multitude of native libraries so they can appear to be platform-agnostic despite the native dependency. It may seem strange that the FNDDS.version file exists in the baseDirectory such that it will be clobbered by related artifacts for different architectures. This design decision is a compromise--it is expected that the Platform specification will evolve to support more platforms while all Maven Artifacts for a specific Artifact must have the same FNDDS.version.