GNU Automake 1.10 review
DownloadAutomake is a tool for automatically generating Makefiles compliant with the GNU Coding Standards. Requirements: · Automake requi
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Automake is a tool for automatically generating Makefiles compliant with the GNU Coding Standards.
Requirements:
Automake requires the use of GNU autoconf.
Automake is currently written in Perl, and requires a Perl interpreter on the developer's system. The resulting Makefile.in's do not require Perl or any other "nonstandard" tool (the complete list of standard tools is mentioned in the coding standards).
If you use the development version from the cvs repository, you must also use the cvs version of Autoconf.
Short term
In the short term, we are working towards Automake 1.5. I want this to be a fairly major release, implementing a number of frequently-requested features. Whether or not this goal can be met in a timely way is uncertain, to say the least, so don't be too disappointed if 1.5 doesn't live up to the expectations I'm about to set.
Rewrite the manual. Progress is slowly being made here.
Medium term
Get rid of ``aclocal'' in favor of some better solution. This probably requires autoconf changes as well.
Support texi-to-html generation.
Finish multilib support, and in general better support cross compiles (this probably requires autoconf support).
Add features to automake to support packaging tools a bit better. In particular it should be possible to associate an installable file with some subpackage name.
Long term
In the long term we are going to rewrite automake in Guile. That should improve the internal structure a bit, and provide opportunities to regularize its feature set.
We'd like to change automake so that implementation variables and targets in the generated Makefile.in follow a naming scheme so they can easily be avoided by user code.
We're also interested in changing automake so that it can more easily be used to generate a single large Makefile
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