Re: An autoconf tutorial.

[Ralf Wildenhues]

Hi Ed,

* E. Rosten wrote on Mon, May 23, 2005 at 06:59:05PM CEST:
> 
> Based on my recent experience of learning to write autoconf for a new 
> library, I have written a brief autoconf tutorial which should be able to 
> get people in to a state where they can start hacking. Everything is 
> accompanied by a short, but working configure.in example.

A couple of quick comments/nits:

| All Autoconf M4 macros look like AC_??????

Nope: A[CST]_* at least, _A[CST]_* for non-public ones, then there are
the Automake ones with AM_* and _AM_*, and the Libtool ones which are
now AC_* but will be LT_*.

Own ones should have a unique prefix..

| M4 arguments are quoted with [ and ]. There is NO WAY to escape these,
| however, you can change the quoting using:
| 
|                          changequote(<<,>>)
|                          
| 
| to change the quoting to << and >>. In the examples here, the default quoting
| will be used. As a result, you can't use the shell command [ to perform tests.
| You have to use test instead.

Please don't encourage use of changequote.  Rather quadrigraphs.

| During a configuration, the configure script will create a file called
| confdefs.h, which is cleaned up at the end. If you copy this file before the
| end, you can keep its contents. The following script does just that:

I believe you rather want to encourage use of AC_CONFIG_HEADERS.  I
thought so far that confdefs.h is not an exported interface.

Regards,
Ralf