21st Century C, 2nd Edition

Chapter 3. Packaging Your Project

Everything is building and it appears

That you’re all architects and engineers.

Fugazi, “Ex-spectator”

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.

I mentioned it in the introduction, but nobody reads introductions, and it bears repeating: the C community holds itself to a very high standard of interoperability. Yes, if you look around your office or coffee shop, everybody is using a homogeneous set of tools, but there is great diversity outside of any local area. Personally, I get emails reasonably often from people using my code on systems that I’ve never seen in person; I think this is amazing, and am always gratified that I strove for interoperability over the easier path of writing code that runs fine on my platform.

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. ...