21st Century C

Chapter 3. Packaging Your Project

If you’ve read this far, then you have met the tools that solve the core problems for dealing with C code, like debugging and documenting it. If you’re eager to get going with C code itself, then feel free to skip ahead to Part II. This chapter and the next will cover some heavy-duty tools intended for collaboration and distribution to others: package-building tools and a revision-control system. Along the way, there will be many digressions about how you can use these tools to write better even when working solo.

In the present day, Autotools, a system for autogenerating the perfect makefile for a given system, is central to how code is distributed. You’ve already met it in Using Libraries from Source, where you used it to quickly install the GNU Scientific Library. Even if you’ve never dealt with it directly, it is probably how the people who maintain your package-management system produced just the right build for your computer.

But you’ll have trouble following what Autotools is doing unless you have a good idea of how a makefile works, so we need to cover those in a little more detail first. But to a first approximation, makefiles are organized sets of shell commands, so you’ll need to get to know the various facilities the shell offers for automating your work. The path is long, but at the end you will be able to:

• Use the shell to automate work.

• Use makefiles to organize all those tasks you have the shell doing.

• Use Autotools to let users autogenerate ...