Building Systems in Vesta

Abstract

The preceding chapter provided the motivation behind Vesta’s system description language and presented its primary constructs. This chapter focuses on the use of SDL to express complex build instructions. Of course, there are many ways to do this and, as noted in the preceding chapter, SDL strives to be “methodology-neutral”. This chapter presents a particular set of choices — a methodology, or a style — that has worked well in practice. Before getting into the details, however, we need to examine some of the considerations that motivated the specific choices this methodology embodies.