From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Jason Molenda To: sourceware-announce@cygnus.com Subject: Three projects up on sourceware.cygnus.com! Date: Mon, 26 Oct 1998 13:37:00 -0000 Message-id: <19981026133751.A8816@cygnus.com> X-SW-Source: 1998/msg00002.html Howdy howdy howdy, we've got three new projects up and running on sourceware.cygnus.com and I want to send a note to let everyone know about them. Automake is a tool used to generate Makefiles. You create the basic information necessary--the files in your project, how they relate--and automake spits out a portable Makefile which has all the little niceties we've all come to love. Automake is used to generate Makefiles for most GNU software out there these days. http://sourceware.cygnus.com/automake/ Autoconf is a tool used in writing portable programs. It runs tests on the host environment to see what kinds of things are available. Are the ISO C standard header files around? Is the 'const' reserved word supported? Where are the X header files? Is the setpgrp provided a BSD one or a POSIX.1 one (they take different arguments)? There are a bazillion little tests like these, and there is even a tool to find out which tests you might want to use for your program to help increase portability. Autoconf eliminates the #ifdef mess where you test against particular compilers, operating systems, chips, or even OS versions. With autoconf, you test for the features you care about directly. You reduce the #if hackery in your program, you increase its portability across different hosts, and your program will stand a better chance of being compilable on some as-yet-unseen OS years from now. As an added bonus, Ben Elliston has just taken over autoconf maintenance after over two years of it being dormant. Ben lives in Australia and is in one of the only cities that _aren't_ by the sea there, so he has nothing better to do all day than look at bug reports against autoconf. So get the latest autoconf code and start testing--there's a big release coming due and he could use your help! http://sourceware.cygnus.com/autoconf/ The last project that is over on sourceware is the pthreads-win32 library. This project is working to provide a pthreads (POSIX threads) API for Win32 (Win95/98/NT) systems and has a few active contributors. Check it out at http://sourceware.cygnus.com/pthreads-win32/ That's it for today! We will add more things in the near future, including the first eCos source release early next week. It should be a blast. Jason Molenda jsm@cygnus.com