Re: autoconf tutorial?

[Toshio Kuratomi <badger prtr-13 ucsc edu>]

On Tue, 10 Mar, 1998 at 07:54:47AM -0700, Mark Galassi set free these words:
> 
>   http://nis-www.lanl.gov/~rosalia/mydocs/autoconf_tutorial_toc.html
> 
> I should warn you that I abandoned this tutorial almost immediately
> because Tom Tromey saw it and pointed me to his (then rather new)
> automake.  I saw that with automake and a couple of examples nobody
> would need a jumpstart on autoconf anymore, so I dropped writing the
> tutorial.
> 
I don't know that I quite agree with this (I don't know enough to actually do
more than that :-)  I've been puzzling through the interactions of autoconf,
automake, and libtool for a week now and my comments are: libtool is pretty
easy to get a handle on since it provides command line tools that can be used
to illustrate how it works in addition to the rulesets.

automake is well documented and seems to bring beginners up to speed rather
quickly.  However (unless I read that excellent documentation wrong), it only
deals with creating the Makefile.in.  configure.in, config.h.in, and etc are
all documented in the autoconf manual.

autoconf has a plethora of tools and files that are a bit overwhelming.  It's
references were also written before automake and libtool were created so it
doesn't have any explanations of how to integrate them into the existing
structure.  The info pages aren't written as a tutorial, more as a reference.
All of which are a bit disheartening to the beginnner.

In other words, I think a good autoconf tutorial is still a necessity for
beginners.  But it should strive to show how to create a complete configure
driven system (both by upgrading an existing package and by creating from
scratch).  It should integrate automake and libtool into the creation process
so we know just where it fits in.  It should present you with the tools for
creating the various files before telling you how to read and change the files
(This seems a more natural order -- create the file, then manually tweak it.)

Uhm... Yeah.  I kinda want to write such a beast, but I'm currently the egg in
the chicken and the egg problem:  I don't know how to use autoconf, so I cna't
run around writing the tutorial that would let me learn how :)

-Toshio

> I'll mail you the texinfo version in individual email, so you can
> print it out.
P.S. Mark: is texinfo still the way to go?  Or is DocBook the metaformat for
the future? :)
-- 
badger  \"The Difference between today and yesterday is not so much what has
@prtr-13 \ changed between then and now as what I hope to change by tomorrow."
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