"The Goat Book" on autotools has been released

Posted 4 Nov 2000 at 16:05 UTC by mvw

The long awaited book on the GNU build tools autoconf, automake and libtool has been released in paper and under the Open Publication license. Here is the link.

This book deals with the autotools, a bunch of infrastructure tools, frameworks that help develop portable applications for a wide range of platforms.

Dealing with this part of project setup/build management has been a kind of black art, mostly due of the fact that while each tool came with good documentation, all tools were clearly meant to interoperate and a unified treatment, that shows how to arrange them was badly needed.

It was written by Gary V. Vaughan, Ben Elliston, Tom Tromey and Ian Lance Taylor and published by New Riders, the folks who published Havoc Pennington's book on GTK+/GNOME under similiar generous conditions.

Do yourself a favour, order the book and in the meantime download a copy or browse it on the above mentioned site.

"... and there was much rejoicing ...", posted 6 Nov 2000 at 10:52 UTC by ztf » (Apprentice)

At least, I'm rejoicing. These tools have been and continue to be absolutely essential to free software hacking, and working with them is very much a black art (one that I've not entirely mastered, despite having created configure.in files).

And I'm glad to see that the "goat" part does not refer to what animal needs to be sacrificed to get them to work properly. :^)

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