[bug-hello] Re: hello audience

[Alexandre Duret-Lutz]

>>> "Karl" == Karl Berry <address@hidden> writes:

 Karl> Whom did you have in mind?

My only interest in Hello is that an old version is used in the
introduction of the Automake manual.  I'd like to
  1. update this example (alone, this is not a problem)
  2. completely revamp the introduction of the manual in a
     way that looks more like a tutorial 

#1 alone should not be a problem, but doing #2 might imply the
removal of the Hello example, it's hard to tell yet.

Recently some people in my team at lip6 asked me for a seminar
to introduce them to the Autotools.  I've started to work on
these slides, and I think I'll be able to reuse the same plan
for the introduction of the Automake manual.  (More about this
later: I plan to post the slides to the autotools lists at some
point.)

The people I target in this tutorial are programmers who never
used the autotools (custom Makefiles), or tried them but never
realized their benefits, or were shied away by the complexity of
all these tools interacting with each other.  (Concerning this
last point, something I have successfully experimented with the
last two people I introduced to autotools is to present them
only "autoreconf" at the beginning---they don't need to know
about all the tools involved to learn them.)

The relation with Hello is that I need to use an example to
present the tools.  Right now I'm using a project which I've
called "amhello-1.0" in my examples (since I plan to reuse this
in Automake), and although I will gradually make it more complex
I don't think I'll ever come close to GNU Hello.  I fear that
Hello is probably already too complicated for a tutorial, and
maybe I can only point to it as advanced material.  Or maybe the
tutorial needs to be extended until it reaches GNU Hello.  I
don't know.  However I'm convinced I should not try to present
an experimental tool that is not yet properly integrated into
the autotools framework (however useful it is).

 Karl> I was envisioning a minimal example package for
 Karl> maintainers, showing the best practices for
 Karl> infrastructure setup.

I agree being an example for GNU maintainers is a sane goal for
GNU Hello.
-- 
Alexandre Duret-Lutz