Quark

Quark is a simple project dependency management system that works at source code level, although it can be used to fetch binary assets as well.

Disclaimer: the manual is still incomplete, but piutost che nient l'è mei piutost.

Name

For some reason, the original author was interested in the Meson build system when writing this tool, and it was thought that Quark would have been a nice companion. Other than that, there's no relation between them (indeed, it turns out that there's zero support for Meson in Quark).

tl;dr quick-start user guide

Note: all commands specified throughout this document must be executed in the root directory of the top-level project unless otherwise specified; it is assumed that quark is in the PATH, although that's not strictly necessary (it's just more convenient).

Installing

Quark is a pure Python 3 tool with zero dependencies outside of the standard library, so no real "installation" is required; in general, virtually all its developers just have a git clone of this repository and either

• add the bin subdirectory to the PATH (where an executable quark is provided for POSIX systems and a quark.cmd wrapper is there as well for the poor souls - and for the CI machines - using Windows),
• or add a symlink to bin/quark in some directory that is already in the PATH (e.g. ~/bin)

The promise here is that in general Quark will only ever provide subcommands to the single quark command.

In general there's no particular assumption about where the repository clone is situated, or whether it is in the PATH at all; on CI machines it can be cloned on the fly and referred to as e.g. ./quark-clone/bin/quark.

That being said, a setup.py is provided, so if you insist you can install it with pip

pip3 install https://github.com/comelz/quark/archive/master.zip

just be aware that it's stuff that is not actively tested.

Fetching dependencies of a quark-based project

quark up

This reads subprojects.quark and fetches the latest version of the dependencies recursively (or the versions specified in freeze.quark, if present). If the checkouts/clones of the dependencies are already present, they are updated and possibly adjusted to point to the expected revision (git fetch/git checkout or svn up -r/svn switch).

Freezing the currently-checked out dependencies

quark freeze

A freeze.quark file is generated; if you want to keep it (e.g. if you are creating a tag of your project) just commit it to your VCS.

Unfreezing the dependencies

Remove freeze.quark, then possibly run quark up to update the dependencies to the latest version.

Full, project-owner guide

Goals and assumptions

Quark strives to solve these problems:

• fetching project dependencies from different VCS - namely, Subversion and git, allowing painless, gradual migration from an svn:externals-based world;
• handling automatically recursive dependencies, so that if project A depends from project B, it does not need to know about B's dependencies;
• handling conditional dependencies (and their consequences on the dependencies graph), so that if B needs C only if a certain B feature is enabled, C isn't dragged in when it's not needed (either just to avoid wasting bandwidth/disk space, or even because such dependency isn't supported by a toolchain used to compile A);
• providing dependencies information to build systems, in particular (as of today) CMake; if A depends from B and D and B depends from C, the relevant add_subdirectories should be automatically generated in the correct order (= they should be topologically sorted), to avoid duplicating the dependencies declarations both in the dependencies file and in the build system;
• providing a convenient way to "freeze" floating dependencies e.g. to archive the current state of the project for a tag;
• optionally, allowing for a central catalog to provide a name→location mapping for dependencies.

To tackle these challenges in a relatively simple fashion, some assumptions about projects are made; in particular:

• one project = one repository = one set of dependencies (although there's some second class support for "clusters" of projects; look for toplevel_project later in the document);
• subprojects.quark, the file containing the dependency information about the project, must be in the root directory of each project (although it can be missing; in this case, the project is assumed not to have dependencies);
• all dependencies are fetched in the same directory; this seems to be the only sane way to handle recursive dependencies that may be shared between multiple subprojects without going mad;
• all projects that refer to some dependency must agree on its definition, so the location must match and the options must not conflict;
• authentication or repo-specific options are not any of Quark's business; URLs of target repositories are passed straight to git or svn; if any particular extra option is needed to connect to some repository (e.g. a custom user-name or ssh key) it must be handled at .ssh/config level or svn/git configuration.

Usage and features

Any quark-enabled project contains a subprojects.quark file in its root. It is a JSON file containing the dependencies, their options and in general Quark-related project options.

Plain dependencies

A simple subprojects.quark for a top-level project (let's call it blur-app) may look like:

{
    "description": "blur-app subprojects.quark",
    "depends": [
        "blurlib":    { "url": "svn+ssh://svn.example.com/svn/blurlib/trunk" },
        "widgetslib": { "url": "git+ssh://[email protected]/widgets-inc/widgets.git" },
        "imagelib":   { "url": "svn+ssh://svn.example.com/svn/imagelib/trunk" }
    ]
}

and let's suppose blurlib's subprojects.quark be like:

{
    "description": "blurlib subprojects.quark",
    "depends": [
        "imagelib":  { "url": "svn+ssh://svn.example.com/svn/imagelib/trunk" },
        "mathlib":   { "url": "svn+ssh://svn.another.example.com/svn/mathlib/trunk" }
    ]
}

Note: the "description" field has no particular significance to Quark; throughout this document I'm just using it to hold comments because JSON stubbornly doesn't allow for comments.

We suppose instead that widgetslib has no subprojects.quark.

In this example, we can see that, at bare minimum, each dependency should have

• a name, which is the key in the depends object; it is used
  • to uniquely identify the dependency across the whole dependency tree (i.e., everybody referring to imagelib must be referring to the same thing);
  • to determine the name of the directory where the checked-out dependency is placed;
• an url, which specifies where the project is located, plus possibly which branch/tag/commit; more details about the exact syntax in a moment. Notice that this may not necessarily be provided explicitly, but may come implicitly through the catalog (explained in a later section).

When performing quark up in our blur-app top-level directory, Quark will extract (or update, if already present) all the dependencies specified in subprojects.quark, discovering and extracting recursive dependencies as it goes and building a dependency tree in the process. At the end, a lib directory will have been created, containing:

lib
├── CMakeLists.txt
├── blurlib
├── widgetslib
├── imagelib
└── mathlib

Note: the target directory for dependencies can be altered specifying a custom subdirectory in the "subprojects_dir" key, as in:

{
    "subprojects_dir": "some_other_lib_directory",
    "depends": ...

Note: an implementation detail allows using relative paths in names, which enable a dirty hack to put single subprojects outside the subprojects directory (and path traversal attacks in malicious cases); this probably won't be fixed (as long as the final target stays in the project directory) for compatibility reasons, but is strongly discouraged.

As can be seen, all dependencies have been "flattened" into a single directory, and, even though imagelib is referenced both by blurlib and by blur-app, a single copy has been extracted. This is nice for bandwidth/disk usage, but most importantly ensures that there's only one version of each library.

For this to be possible, when discovering dependencies Quark ensures that a given library is defined univocally; if two subprojects refer to a dependency with the same name, but with different URLs (or other incompatible options), the checkout is aborted.

Also, a CMakeLists.txt has been generated that refers to all the subprojects in the correct (topologically-sorted) order; more on this later.

Project URL format and VCS-specific quirks

Quark refers to project URLs in various places, most importantly in the "url" field of dependency objects and in the freeze.quark file; a project URL identifies the VCS to use to fetch the project, the location where the project is stored down to the branch/tag/commit to extract.

The protocol part of an URL (the part before ://) is used to identify what VCS to use; URLs starting with svn+ are handled by Subversion, while those starting with git+ refer to git repositories.

Subversion

# trunk of the library
svn+ssh://svn.example.com/svn/blurlib/trunk
# trunk at a particular revision
svn+ssh://svn.example.com/svn/blurlib/trunk@92642
# some branch of the library
svn+ssh://svn.example.com/svn/blurlib/branches/fix-blurriness

Subversion URLs are the easiest; tags and branches are just regular subdirectories of a Subversion repository, and the "peg-revision" @ syntax is used for the required revision. If a revision is not specified, the current HEAD is implied.

When updating an already checked-out dependency, svn up is used whenever possible, svn switch when necessary (svn switch is able to do all that svn up can, but often touches files timestamps for no good reason).

Notice that this means that untracked files and whatever other garbage is left there by you or by svn is left untouched - no effort is made by Quark to clobber the dependency directory. This is deliberate, as a "clean", CI-made build should be made checking out everything from scratch anyway, while for development we don't want to risk removing user-made work (even if temporary).

Git

# HEAD of the library
git+ssh://[email protected]/widgets-inc/widgets.git
# specific commit
git+ssh://[email protected]/widgets-inc/widgets.git#commit=541acef52
# specific branch
git+ssh://[email protected]/widgets-inc/widgets.git#branch=fix-broken-comboboxes
# specific tag
git+ssh://[email protected]/widgets-inc/widgets.git#tag=r1.25

In Git URLs are generally used only to represent remotes, so some extra syntax has to be used to specify exactly what ref is to be extracted; the source of inspiration here are sources for Arch Linux PKGBUILD files, so commit, branch and tag fragments can be specified.

The update process for a git repository is essentially a git fetch + git checkout. As the specified refs are always relative to the remote, after Quark does his thing (checking out e.g. origin/master) the repository will be in detached head state; as this is often inconvenient, it's in the plans to add some heuristic to check out the corresponding local tracking branch, if available.

Options and optional dependencies

When specifying a dependency, it is possible to pass options to it; these are used essentially in two ways:

• to be automatically passed to the build system of the module (currently, only for CMake);
• to control optional dependencies of subprojects.

Let's get back to our blur-app example; blurlib may provide several blur algorithms, some of which may require arbitrary precision arithmetic; on the other hand, when compiling for weak ARM targets we just want the baseline stuff, to avoid wasting time with a library that we won't use and may not even be available for this architecture. We can specify it as an optional dependency:

{
    "description": "blurlib subprojects.quark",
    "depends": [
        "imagelib": { "url": "svn+ssh://svn.example.com/svn/imagelib/trunk" },
        "mathlib":  { "url": "svn+ssh://svn.another.example.com/svn/mathlib/trunk" }
    ],
    "optdepends": {
        "BLURLIB_ENABLE_LUXURY_BLURS": [{
            "value": true,
            "depends": {
                "aparith": { "url": "git+ssh://[email protected]/vendor/aparith.git#tag=v2.0" }
            }
        }]
    ]
}

As blur-app is an application for the true blur connoisseur, this feature is promptly enabled:

{
    "description": "blur-app subprojects.quark",
    "depends": [
        "blurlib": {
            "options": { "BLURLIB_ENABLE_LUXURY_BLURS": true },
            "url": "svn+ssh://svn.example.com/svn/blurlib/trunk"
        },
        "widgetslib": { "url": "git+ssh://[email protected]/widgets-inc/widgets.git" },
        "imagelib":   { "url": "svn+ssh://svn.example.com/svn/imagelib/trunk" }
    ]
}

This will have the effect of including aparith in the project dependencies, and of defining the CMake variable BLURLIB_ENABLE_LUXURY_BLURS in the CMakeLists.txt generated by Quark (more on this later).

optdepends structure

The general structure for optdepends is

{
    "optdepends": {
        "OPTION1": [ condition1, condition2, condition3, ...  ],
        "OPTION2": [ condition4, condition5, condition6, ...  ]
    }
}

where each condition is of the form

{
    "value": value_to_match,
    "depends": { dependencies as in the regular "depends" block }
}

When processing the module, the value of each OPTION is considered, and is compared to the value of the various conditions; conditions that match have their depends section processed, essentially as if it was contained in the regular depends section of the root object.

Note: even though the data is stored in JSON files, comparison is performed using Python's == operator, so if you wanted to match 0 with [null] you are in for a sad surprise.

Adding options to existing modules

A depends block inside an option condition can also refer to an already referenced module, without repeating its URL, just to add another option to it; blurlib may also want to enable some extra stuff in mathlib if BLURLIB_ENABLE_LUXURY_BLURS is enabled; this is easily done:

{
    "description": "blurlib subprojects.quark",
    "depends": [
        "imagelib":  { "url": "svn+ssh://svn.example.com/svn/imagelib/trunk" },
        "mathlib":   { "url": "svn+ssh://svn.another.example.com/svn/mathlib/trunk" }
    ],
    "optdepends": {
        "BLURLIB_ENABLE_LUXURY_BLURS": [{
            "value": true,
            "depends": {
                "aparith": { "url": "git+ssh://[email protected]/vendor/aparith.git#tag=v2.0" },
                "mathlib": { "options": { "MATHLIB_EXTRA_POWERFUL_MATH": true } }
            }
        }]
    ]
}

Combining options, conflicts, acceptable values

When multiple projects depend from the same project, the options are combined:

• as long as they are independent, they are added to the options dictionary;
• if there are conflicting values for the same option, the process is aborted.

Thus, the general idea is for projects to provide options that are additive and compatible with each other; this ensures that a dependency that enables some option doesn't break other projects that don't explicitly mention it.

Acceptable values for options are essentially JSON scalars, so booleans, numbers and strings; there is almost nothing inside Quark that stops you from using lists and objects, but it's entirely unsupported, and will probably break when writing the CMakeLists.txt. In practice, there are probably zero places where in our code bases anything but boolean options are used.

Options scoping and naming

Scoping for options started out as local for each dependency, but that quickly turned out to be just wishful thinking, especially as ultimately all options are lumped together when writing CMakeLists.txt; thus, options scoping is now essentially global (unfortunately it's a bit more complicated than this, but sooner or later it will be fixed).

This means that, as a module writer, you are expected to come up with options names that are unlikely to collide with options of other modules; prefixing them the name of the project is common accepted practice.

As these options get turned into CMake variables, they are generally spelled in SCREAMING_SNAKE_CASE (i.e. like C preprocessor macros). Also for this reason, while Quark per se shouldn't have any problem dealing with full-zalgo variable names, you should keep in mind that ultimately they will be fed to CMake, which is way more picky and guarantees hours of debugging fun whenever something goes wrong.

Top-level checkout options

"Library-like" projects can often be checked out in two ways: as dependencies of another project, and as a standalone project, generally to develop the library and launch automatic tests.

If your library project has options, how would you set their when it is checked out as a top-level project?

The quick & dirty way is to use the -o argument to quark up; it allows you to specify the checkout options with -o KEY=VALUE syntax.

An approach that is usually more convenient is instead to use the toplevel_options field of the root object, which is a plain "OPTION_NAME": "option_value" dictionary (exactly as the options field in a dependency object).

For a library with optional dependencies, generally this means enabling all of them to have them checked out to test the full feature set. Testing the reduced feature set instead can be done (for CMake-based projects) by explicitly disabling the options through CMake when preparing the out-of-tree build.

Another case in which toplevel_options comes in handy is when your tests depend from a big data files, that you don't want to inflict on your dependent projects, that are generally uninterested in the tests; in this case, you can put the data files in a separate repository, have it as an optional dependency and enable the corresponding option only in toplevel_options.

To come back to our blurlib example, it would then become:

{
    "description": "blurlib subprojects.quark",
    "toplevel_options": { "BLURBLIB_ENABLE_LUXURY_BLURS": true, "BLURLIB_ENABLE_TEST_DATA": true },
    "depends": [
        "imagelib": { "url": "svn+ssh://svn.example.com/svn/imagelib/trunk" },
        "mathlib":  { "url": "svn+ssh://svn.another.example.com/svn/mathlib/trunk" }
    ],
    "optdepends": {
        "BLURLIB_ENABLE_LUXURY_BLURS": [{
            "value": true,
            "depends": {
                "aparith": { "url": "git+ssh://[email protected]/vendor/aparith.git#tag=v2.0" },
                "mathlib": { "options": { "MATHLIB_EXTRA_POWERFUL_MATH": true } }
            }
        }],
        "BLURLIB_ENABLE_TEST_DATA": [{
            "value": true,
            "depends": {
                "blurlib_test_data": { "url": "svn+ssh://svn.example.com/svn/blurlib_test_data/trunk" },
            }
        }]
    ]
}

Advanced dependencies features

TODO

CMake integration

TODO

The catalog

As you start using Quark for many projects, the widespread duplication of the shared dependencies' URLs becomes problematic, as:

• it is tedious to keep copy-pasting stuff to setup new projects;
• it is also error-prone, as you may inadvertently start calling the same dependency with different names;
• it makes migrations of dependencies to "new homes" (be them just a different URL for the same data, or even Subversion to git migrations) more difficult, as all projects have to be manually updated.

For this reason, Quark supports a "catalog". Each subprojects.quark can specify a catalog entry consisting of an HTTP(S) URL from where the catalog is fetched.

The catalog file itself is structured in the same way as a depends section of a regular subprojects.quark, so it consists of an object mapping projects names to dependency objects, generally containing just the url entry, but that can also contain default options for the module.

When a subprojects.quark refers to a catalog, the content of the catalog is fetched; then, whenever a dependency is considered, the corresponding entry (if any) in the catalog is used as "starting point", and it is updated (as in Python's dict.update) with the subprojects.quark-specified data. This means that the project-specific data will always have the last word, but in general you can benefit from catalog-provided defaults, especially for the location.

In common usage this means that generally most dependency entries in a subprojects.quark using a catalog will be empty objects (or at most containing just options), as the URL will be provided by the catalog. Our blur-app example using a catalog such as:

{
    "blurlib":    { "url": "svn+ssh://svn.example.com/svn/blurlib/trunk" },
    "widgetslib": { "url": "git+ssh://[email protected]/widgets-inc/widgets.git" },
    "imagelib":   { "url": "svn+ssh://svn.example.com/svn/imagelib/trunk" },
    "mathlib":    { "url": "svn+ssh://svn.another.example.com/svn/mathlib/trunk" }
    "aparith":    { "url": "git+ssh://[email protected]/vendor/aparith.git#tag=v2.0" }
}

will become something like

{
    "description": "blur-app subprojects.quark",
    "catalog": "https://catalog.example.com/quark-catalog.json",
    "depends": [
        "blurlib":    { "options": { "BLURLIB_ENABLE_LUXURY_BLURS": true } },
        "widgetslib": { },
        "imagelib":   { }
    ]
}

{
    "description": "blurlib subprojects.quark",
    "toplevel_options": { "BLURBLIB_ENABLE_LUXURY_BLURS": true, "BLURLIB_ENABLE_TEST_DATA": true },
    "depends": [
        "imagelib":  { },
        "mathlib":   { }
    ],
    "optdepends": {
        "BLURLIB_ENABLE_LUXURY_BLURS": [{
            "value": true,
            "depends": {
                "aparith": { },
                "mathlib": { }
            }
        }],
        "BLURLIB_ENABLE_TEST_DATA": [{
            "value": true,
            "depends": {
                "blurlib_test_data": { "url": "svn+ssh://svn.example.com/svn/blurlib_test_data/trunk" },
            }
        }]
    ]
}

SSL issues

Python has a somewhat troubled relationship with certificates stores; at the moment of writing there are serious bugs related to Python being unable to find or use the system certificate store, in particular on macOS and on every Windows version after Vista. For this reason, if your catalog is served through HTTPS you may be unable to access it due to certificate errors.

As a workaround, if certificate validation fails Quark tries to automatically fallback to using curl if it is in the PATH; this generally works well enough on macOS. In future we may try to fallback even on the certifi package, if it is installed, although it's suboptimal as well, as most often it will be outdated.

Frozen dependencies (freeze.quark)

TODO