Niels’ Homepage

In the previous installment a skeleton Autotools project was created. In this installment the usage of libraries for the application code will be added. I like putting my application data into libraries as it makes it more convenient to reuse the code, e.g. when doing unit testing (which will be shown in a later installment).

In this installment a skeleton setup for handling libraries using Libtool will be presented. At the end the methods to link against the static or dynamic libraries will be shown. The created library will be a very trivial one but the created skeleton should be enough to expand on this.
Continue Reading »

For most software projects that go past the trivial state a build environment can assist in helping with finding dependencies, providing alternatives, documentation creation, unit testing, etc. One of the most flexible environments are provided by the GNU Autotools, but setting up a new Autotools project can be a bit cumbersome. It always seem to give me the feeling that I have to rediscover everything about the GNU Autotools and to avoid making the same mistakes over and over again I kept a lot of notes. The disadvantage of personal notes are of course:

• They get disorganized
• They are hard to keep up-to-date
• They are not always available
• It is difficult to transfer the knowledge contained in them to another person

So therefore I decided to do what I always do to solve these issues: I publish the knowledge on a subject that I obtained so far on my homepage. It will be series of installments, each building on the knowledge from the previous installments. In this first installment a trivial ‘Hello, World!’ project will be created. Later installments will provide information on:

• Creating and using libraries
• Creating and using unit tests
• Creating documentation with Doxygen
• Creating documentation with Docbook

But more subjects might be added in the future. It is also most likely that new insights will be added to already published parts and I will try to indicate the new additions as good as possible.

Since I consider these my personal notes they are not a replacement for the full GNU Autotools documentation and other resources. For more in-depth information the following on- and off-line resources are recommended:

• The Autotools tutorial by Alexandre Duret-Lutz. It not only provides a nice tutorial in the form of a presentation but also provides a lot of links to other resources.
• Autotools: a practitioner’s guide to Autoconf, Automake and Libtool by John Calcote. based on these he published a book with the same name. Highly recommended.
• One of the first books published on the GNU Autotools was the so-called ‘Goat Book‘ by Gary V. Vaughan, Ben Elliston, Tom Tromey and Ian Lance Taylor. It has since been published on-line and, although it is not the most accessible text on the subject, it still contains a lot of good information.

Although I consider these my notes, complete with rough-edges and warts and all, and by no means a complete tutorial on the subject I do still appreciate any remarks or comments. Nowhere will a setup guide for the used tools be given. These differ to much from system to system and with the use of Google resources with better information than I can provide should be available.

Continue Reading »