[Autogen-announce] GNU AutoGen Version 5.17/AutoOpts Version 37.0

[Bruce K. <bk...@gn...>]

GNU AutoGen/AutoOpts is a two-part project that serves two separate
purposes.  The two parts are combined because they are inextricably
intertwined:

AutoGen is a tool designed to simplify the creation and maintenance of
programs that contain large amounts of repetitious text.  It is
especially valuable in programs that have several blocks of text that
must be kept synchronized.

AutoOpts is both an example of that and a project in its own right.
It is a very powerful configuration file, environment variable and
command line option documentation and management tool consisting of a
set of AutoGen templates and a run time library that nearly eliminates
the hassle of managing, parsing and documenting program options.

The self-referential example:
http://www.gnu.org/software/autogen/man1-autogen.html

Subprojects:  AutoGen contains several "subprojects" since it relies
on them and arranging for their distribution ahead of time is painful.
There are basically two:

FSM - A finite state machine generator.  It allows you to specify an
fsm by specifying the states, the valid transitions and the actions
to take for the valid transitions.  The actions may be either function
calls or switch/case elements.  The processing may be step-and-return,
process-until-done or reentrant.

Further details can be seen in the leading comments of fsm.tpl.

New in 5.17 - December, 2012
NEWS entries since the last release:

* Bit Map and Enumeration templates are now fully integrated.
  They have their own section in the texi docs and the
  templates produce more easily used output.

* Guile adjustments.  Guile inserts /usr/local/lib into the
  LD_LIBRARY_PATH variable, causing problems when you are
  trying to run programs that use not-yet-installed libraries.
  LD_LIBRARY_PATH is now discarded.  :(

* The AG_TEST_GUILE_VERSION will now try "rpm -q" first
  before dpkg, "guile-config --verision" and "guile --version".

* If a "min" count value has been specified, the emitted shell script
  option parsing code will now verify that the option appears that
  minimum number of times.

AutoGen home:    http://www.gnu.org/software/autogen/
primary ftp:     ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/autogen/rel5.17/
.tar.gz:         ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/autogen/rel5.17/autogen-5.17.tar.gz
.tar.xz:         ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/autogen/rel5.17/autogen-5.17.tar.xz
bug reports:     autogen-users at the lists dot SourceForge net domain
bug archive:     http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?forum_name=autogen-users
maintainer:      Bruce Korb - bkorb at the usual GNU domain