Bii not finding dependencies in project when not initialized with "-L"

Question

I'm taking my first steps with bii. I can complete the get started tutorial with no problems. However, when I manually create a new project on github, pull it, add a main file with gtest and gmock includes, run the commend bii init within the project folder, then type bii find, I just get the following . .

INFO: Processing changes...

INFO: No deps to find on server

I worked out that if I initialize the repository with bii init -L then everything works. However, bii init --help says . .

usage: bii init [-h] [-L [LAYOUT]] [name]

creates a new biicode project

positional arguments: name Optional name of the folder. If specified, bii will create a new folder and initialize a project inside, otherwise, it will try to initialize in the current folder

optional arguments: -h, --help show this help message and exit -L [LAYOUT], -l [LAYOUT], --layout [LAYOUT] Optional layout. If no param is specified, it will use the "minimal" one. Other available: CLion

Which suggests the L parameter is ignored if I do not specify a layout.

My question is what does the L parameter do with no layout specified, compared to just typing bii init with no extra params?

NOTES:

• OSX 10.10.2

• bii 2.7

Answer 1

Basically

$ bii init -L 

is the same as

$ bii init -L=simple

Where simple is the minimal layout, that allows to edit a block directly in the project root.

Surely the command help can be improved. The resulting layout will be:

project
 |-bii
 |  |-deps
 |  |-cmake
 |  |-build
 |-bin
 |  |-myexe
 |-main.cpp

If not using the -L option, you are creating a regular biicode project layout, which is much different, that require user blocks to be inside the "blocks" folder and all the aux folders (deps, build, cmake) will be in the project root. The typical workflow there would be

$ bii init myproject
$ cd myproject
$ git clone repo-url blocks/mybiicodeuser/myblockname

It is typical that the blockname is equal to the github repository name, and many people have a username equal for github and biicode.

Answer 2

bii init command without parameters enables working with multiple blocks at the same time within the same project.

It inits by default a classic layout. Its behaviour is explained in biicode's docs here.

To use it:

bii init to init your project and then bii new username/blockname to create the folder structure needed to use multiple blocks at the same time.

Then your code should be placed under project/blocks/username/blockname directory.

Using bii init enables working with multiple blocks like this:

cd your_project_name
bii open examples/tinythread
bii open examples/box2d
bii build
cd bin
./run_any_exectuable_here

You can also check the docs section about layouts.