I searched the archives and the manuals and have not found anything related to this topic so I will throw it out to all of you folks.
Can you use autoconf/automake/libtool in conjunction with literate programming tools such as noweb? For those that are asking, "noweb" is a tool that mingles the source and documentation in one file. You use a set of processing programs to "extract" the source code (.cpp and .h files for example) from the document file (.nw file). It is not like JavaDoc or the other documentation flavors that "hide" the documentation in commented code -- the base file has both doc and source in it and additional tools are *required* to extract and utilize either. I have not seen how I could override the rules to produce .cpp files from the output of the noweb tools. I have to think that in a world with automated code generators (yacc(1), etc.) that this sort of thing has been tried before, but I have struck out on finding it. I am not worried about detecting the presence of the noweb tools because that part I understand (AC_CHECK_PROG). What I don't understand is how to teach the autoconfig system how to take a .nw file and make the .cpp and .h files. The yacc/lex notes about automake state that it expects the output files to have the default names which leads me to believe that utilizing these types of programs is actually hard coded in some what into automake. In the automake manual, section "3.3 Building true and false" leads me to believe that I could hand code the dependencies to produce the source code from the base files but that would require a lot of effort and it would be a maintaince nightmare. The system is supposed to help simplify and automate this process so I am hoping that I am just missing something ... of course I presently need to do this anyway. I can always create all of the .cpp and .h files prior to distribution but we would also like to use this semi-automated build environment for day-to-day development. And day-to-day we edit the .nw files and our current "hand-crafted" Makefiles do all the rest. I know that this is probabely an automake(1) question, but automake did not appear to habe a mailing list ;) I am new to using these tools and any guidance is always apprechiated ... scott -- Scott D. Brown // Research Scientist // [EMAIL PROTECTED] Digital Imaging and Remote Sensing Lab // Rochester Institute of Technology 54 Lomb Memorial Dr. Rochester, NY 14623 // VX:585.475.7194 // FX:585.475.5988
