This package defines utility interfaces and objects for interacting and working with Apple's CoreFoundation framework.
In particular, emphasis is placed on making interwork with POSIX, C, and, in particular, C++ intrinsic types easier and/or more type-safe.
Select interfaces and/or objects for working with the following CoreFoundation objects and facilities are available:
- Reference counting and types
- Booleans
- Dates and Time
- Dictionaries
- Numbers
- Property Lists
- Sets
- Strings
- Trees
If you are not using a prebuilt distribution of CFUtilities, building CFUtilities should be a straightforward, two- or three-step process. If you are building from the main branch, start with:
% ./bootstrap
If you are building from the main branch, a release branch, or a distribution package, continue (main branch) or start with:
% ./configure
% make
The first bootstrap step creates the configure script and Makefile.in files
from configure.ac and Makefile.am respectively and only needs to be done once
unless those input files have changed.
The second configure step generates Makefile files from Makefile.in files and only
needs to be done once unless those input files have changed.
Although not strictly necessary, the additional step of sanity checking the build results is recommended:
% make check
CFUtilities depends on the Apple CoreFoundation framework or library. The framework may be provided on the iOS or macOS (or other) platforms as a native system framework. Alternatively, CoreFoundation may be provided as a static or shared library via either the Apple CFLite project or via the OpenCFLite project fork thereof.
The configure step recognizes and accepts provisions for working with either
the native framework or the library and attempts to automatically detect and use
the appropriate instance based on the target platform.
Regardless of the CoreFoundation source, CFUtilities has been proven to work with CoreFoundation versions between and 476.0 and 1258.1, inclusive.
Additionally, CFUtilities depends on:
- Boost
- CppUnit
However, CppUnit is only required when building and running the CFUtilities unit test suite.
If you want to modify or otherwise maintain the CFUtilities build system, see "Maintaining CFUtilities" below for more information.
To install CFUtilities for your use simply invoke:
% make install
to install CFUtilities in the location indicated by the --prefix configure
option (default "/usr/local"). If you intended an arbitrarily
relocatable CFUtilities installation and passed --prefix=/ to configure,
then you might use DESTDIR to, for example install CFUtilities in your user
directory:
% make DESTIDIR="${HOME}" install
If you want to maintain, enhance, extend, or otherwise modify CFUtilities, it is likely you will need to change its build system, based on GNU autotools, in some circumstances.
After any change to the CFUtilities build system, including any Makefile.am
files or the configure.ac file, you must run the bootstrap or
bootstrap-configure (which runs both bootstrap and configure in
one shot) script to update the build system.
Due to its leverage of GNU autotools, if you want to modify or
otherwise maintain the CFUtilities build system, the following
additional packages are required and are invoked by bootstrap:
- autoconf
- automake
- libtool
On Debian-based Linux distributions such as Ubuntu, these dependencies can be satisfied with the following:
% sudo apt-get install autoconf automake libtool
On Mac OS X, these dependencies can be installed and satisfied using Brew:
% brew install autoconf automake libtool
There are numerous avenues for CFUtilities support:
- Bugs and feature requests — submit to the Issue Tracker
CFUtilities follows the Semantic Versioning guidelines for release cycle transparency and to maintain backwards compatibility.
CFUtilities is released under the Apache License, Version 2.0 license.
See the LICENSE file for more information.