confiserie 0.0.4 review

confiserie is a replacement for GNU(Posix?) systems of the well known gnu autoconf it's also the french term for "sweet"

License: Artistic License File size: 0K Developer: Malet JL

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confiserie is a replacement for GNU(Posix?) systems of the well known gnu autoconf it's also the french term for "sweet". It's like them : a small goodlooking tastefull thing that make developers happy.

It's a set of scripts to run to check particular requirements of a package, a script to help user maintaining the pakage's scripts, a set of Makefiles templates.

The main goal is to teach user good behaviour when creating a software and not only depend on autotools whithout understanding a single step of what they do.

Why such a Project?

because autoconf rely on the knowledge of 2 languages to be used and extented:

(ba)sh

for checking the return values in case of use, behave correctly
in case of extention of autoconf you need to know sh to create the test

m4

to include it inside your sh test for use
m4 to include it into autoconf for extension

because autoconf need the creation (and create) lot of "unused files" (files produced to produce another files using autotools, where only one file is required)
because the same can be achieved more easely with well designed sh scripts
because programmer often learn sh to make simple SA tasks and find autoconf script unreadable
because the output of an autoconf/automake is often unreadable and don't take advantages of modern make
the main goal is to teach user good behaviour when creating a software and not only depend on autotools whithout understanding a single step of what they do : it's a kind of "educationware"

Requirements:
a working POSIX/X-Open shell. (like bash)
a working awk (like gnu awk) (because OBJDIR won't be supported else......)
a set of working binutils (ln, echo....)
a sane developement environment
for advanced features (makefiles templates and related tests) you will need GNU MAKE