AutoGen: The Automated Program Generator / News: Recent posts

AutoOpts, a component of AutoGen, has a new suite of functions for saving and restoring option processing state. Very useful for writing dynamically reconfigurable daemon processes. Also included with this release are templates for producing command line and library documentation; both for man pages and texinfo documents. How to use these is even documented! See the announcement page: http://autogen.sourceforge.net/announce.html for fuller details.

AutoOpts, a component of AutoGen, has a new suite of functions for saving and restoring option processing state. Very useful for writing dynamically reconfigurable daemon processes. Also included with this release are templates for producing command line and library documentation; both for man pages and texinfo documents. How to use these is even documented! See <a href="http://autogen.sourceforge.net/announce.html">the announcement page</a> for fuller details.

The documentation for generating C code for several flavors of finite state machines has now been written and added to the <A HREF="http://autogen.sourceforge.net/autofsm.html" >AutoGen Homepages</A>.

Today's release will enable closely related programs or option sets to share a single RC file. See:

http://autogen.sourceforge.net/autoopts/index.html

AutoOpts is now capable of handling ``immediate action'' options. This means that, for example, an RC file in your home directory can tell AutoOpts to not process a global RC file, even though the global RC file is normally processed first. This feature will also eventually make it possible to reorder intermixed options and arguments, much as the GNU get_long_opts procedure does.

See http://AutoGen.SourceForge.net/announce.html

AutoOpts is now capable of handling ``immediate action'' options. This means that, for example, an RC file in your home directory can tell AutoOpts to not process a global RC file, even though the global RC file is normally processed first. This feature will also eventually make it possible to reorder intermixed options and arguments, much as the GNU get_long_opts procedure does.

Today's release (October 17,2000) release of AutoOpts/AutoGen implements automated main() and inner_main() routines that will process your options, environment variables and RC files, then define Guile/Scheme variables to contain the option state and call Guile's or your main processing routine.

Also in today's release, you can specify that an option is to accept only certain keywords as the option argument value. AutoOpts will validate the string and return an enumeration value to your program.

Sad, but true. I need to make AutoOpts compile under K&R
compiler constraints. (See http://AutoGen.SourceForge.net/autoopts/). I am working it into the libtool sources. (See http://www.fsf.org/software/libtool/)
It fails using gcc with -traditional under Linux because of system header macros. If someone out there were to email me, I would be forever grateful! Thanks.
- Bruce <bkorb@users.sourceforge.net>

Automated Option processing has been available for a long time for C/C++ programs and shell scripts. It is now available on an experimental basis for Guile programs as well. It includes all the features described in:
http://AutoGen.sourceforge.net/autoopts/index.html
If you are interested in never having to hassle with option loops again in your Guile-based programs, please let me know: mailto:bkorb@users.sourceforge.net. I do need a few volunteers before I want to make a public release.

NFSv4 batches procedure calls together, processing
all the calls and responses with a single procedure. RPCGEN does not support this. These
AutoGen templates are a layer on top of RPCGEN that will do all the argument collection and batch dispatching that you would otherwise have to do by hand.
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There was also a release of AutoGen today, primarily for the CigWin environment.