Autoconf and automake

[Siddharth H. <he...@ho...>]

Hello,

I downloaded your fine program the other day and tried to use it. As per the 
INSTALL file one needs to change the first line to indicate the location of 
perl manually and manually copy the same to the installation directory.

I thought it would be a better idea to do this automatically. I have written 
two files configure.in and Makefile.am to do the same. These are used by the 
GNU autoconf and automake utilities to automatically generate a Makefile to 
check the location of perl and to write the same into the program.

In case you are not familiar with autotools, here's the procedure I 
followed.
$ aclocal  #creates a file called aclocal.m4
$ autoconf #creates configure and other config related files from   
configure.in .
$ automake -a #creates Makefile.in from Makefile.am and adds GNU specific 
files
$ ./configure #Checks the local m/c configuration and creates Makefile
$ make #Creates code2html
$ make install #Installs code2html to /usr/local/bin
$ make distcheck #Checks for inconsistencies and makes 
code2html-0.8.12.tar.gz which can be distributed.

End-users would have to only do the following
$ ./configure
$ make
$ make install

CAVEATS:
I have not made any changes to the actual perl script except to change its 
name from code2html to code2html.pl. After make is completed a file called 
code2html will be recreated from code2html.pl

Secondly, for automake and make distcheck to work properly according to GNU 
Coding Guidelines there has to be three more files.
1. AUTHORS. This file should indicate who the author(s) is
2. NEWS. Any new happenings
3. COPYING. Contains the license with the software can be distributed.
You can either touch these files or just link them to the other files.

Regards,
Sid
_________________________________________________________________________
Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com.

Share information about yourself, create your own public profile at 
http://profiles.msn.com.