Re: autoconf/configure

[Frederick I Gleef <gleef capital net>]

Ted Irons wrote:
> Is there a difference between the autoconf
> and configure (or config) packages?

"configure" is a script for determining what is on a system, and using
that information to make Makefiles.

"autoconf" is a tool for making configure scripts.

"config.*" are various files used by configure.


> I pulled down autoconf from prep.ai.mit.edu,
> but it had no documentation.

It probably did, but in hiding :-).  The GNU packages generally have
the documentation included in the tarball.  In this case, the files
autoconf.info and autoconf.texi are the documentation in two different
formats.  If, after running configure, you type "make dvi" it will make a
dvi file of the documentation, that could be read, printed or converted to
postscript as needed.

Alternately, a good place for GNU documentation in general (and autoconf
in particular) is at <http://www.delorie.com/gnu/docs/>.  There they have
documentation for most GNU packages, nicely converted to HTML format.


> Is there a tutorial somewhere to get one
> started with configure?
> I thought I saw a tutorial for this on the
> gnome home page, but no longer see it.

Once you have a configure script, or run "autogen.sh" once to get one, you
can type "./configure --help" and get a list of options available.  It's
pretty straightforward to use configure.  Using autoconf is pretty tricky.

Mark Galassi wrote a very good autoconf tutorial.  You can find it at 
<http://nis-www.lanl.gov/~rosalia/mydocs/autoconf_tutorial_toc.html>.


Best of Luck,
-Gleef