I'm working on a parser library for an open-source project (www.yaml.org). I'm using Autoconf/Automake. Everything works fine (well, I gave up on libtool after a while, but at this stage its OK to use a static library; in fact it might make sense to keep it static forever).
My biggest hurdle was getting Automake to understand
generating documentation using Doxygen. What with the
multiple possible output formats, auto-detecting the required
programs (doxygen, dot, latex, pdflatex, dvips, etc.) etc. it
evolved into a mini-project all by itself. I finally bit the
bullet and created two files, one with macros for Autoconf,
and one with a Makefile section template for Automake, that
do a fair job of handling all the subtleties involved. You
even get configure options that control the type of
documentation you want to generate (subject to the required
programs being there, of course). As they are very small, I'm
attaching them together with a sample doxygen.cfg file that
uses the environment variables set by 'configure'.
This means I didn't get any work done on my project itself,
as you can imagine, and I really want to get cracking on it.
What's the best way to submit my macros to somewhere where
they may be used by others? It seems rather wasteful not to
do something with these files. Ideally they would be
integrated into the Automake/Autoconf distribution.
Certainly I'm not the only one that uses Doxygen for
generating library documentation. I know Texinfo is supposed
to be "the" way to document GNU packages, but I (and, it
seems, many others) find it much more convenient to document
the code in the code itself, using structured comments.
Doxygen does allow adding introduction/tutorial pages, so the
result does not necessarily need to be an incomprehensible
list of function calls. And yes, I know I could use c2man to
generate Texinfo directly from my code, but it is a very
rudimentary tool compared to Doxygen.
At any rate, I did try to follow the Autoconf coding
standards as much as possible, and commented things to a
reasonable level. I named everything global 'DX_*' so as not
to pollute the 'AC_' and 'AM' name spaces. The Automake part
is pretty rudimentary - it is just a simple "aminclude.am"
file containing "if @DX_*" that generate the right Makefile
code. I'm dimly aware there's a way to write Automake macros
that would do a better job integrating with Automake, but I
didn't find any documentation on how to do that. I can spend
another day or so on these files to make them more acceptable
for inclusion in the distribution, if given a hint on what's required.
So... What's next? Or should I just forget about it and keep
these files as part of my library's distribution?
Share & Enjoy,
Oren Ben-Kiki
dx_automake.tar.gz
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