configure.info: History
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History
This is a very brief and probably inaccurate history.
As the number of Unix variants increased during the 1980s, it became
harder to write programs which could run on all variants. While it was
often possible to use `#ifdef' to identify particular systems,
developers frequently did not have access to every system, and the
characteristics of some systems changed from version to version.
By 1992, at least three different approaches had been developed:
* The Metaconfig program, by Larry Wall, Harlan Stenn, and Raphael
Manfredi.
* The Cygnus configure script, by K. Richard Pixley, and the gcc
configure script, by Richard Stallman. These use essentially the
same approach, and the developers communicated regularly.
* The autoconf program, by David MacKenzie.
The Metaconfig program is still used for Perl and a few other
programs. It is part of the Dist package. I do not know if it is
being developed.
In 1994, David MacKenzie and others modified autoconf to incorporate
all the features of Cygnus configure. Since then, there has been a
slow but steady conversion of GNU programs from Cygnus configure to
autoconf. gcc has been converted, eliminating the gcc configure script.
GNU autoconf was regularly maintained until late 1996. As of this
writing in June, 1998, it has no public maintainer.
Most programs are built using the make program, which requires the
developer to write Makefiles describing how to build the programs.
Since most programs are built in pretty much the same way, this led to a
lot of duplication.
The X Window system is built using the imake tool, which uses a
database of rules to eliminate the duplication. However, building a
tool which was developed using imake requires that the builder have
imake installed, violating one of the goals of the GNU system.
The new BSD make provides a standard library of Makefile fragments,
which permits developers to write very simple Makefiles. However, this
requires that the builder install the new BSD make program.
In 1994, David MacKenzie wrote the first version of automake, which
permitted writing a simple build description which was converted into a
Makefile which could be used by the standard make program. In 1995, Tom
Tromey completely rewrote automake in Perl, and he continues to enhance
it.
Various free packages built libraries, and by around 1995 several
included support to build shared libraries on various platforms.
However, there was no consistent approach. In early 1996, Gordon
Matzigkeit began working on libtool, which provided a standardized
approach to building shared libraries. This was integrated into
automake from the start.
The development of automake and libtool was driven by the GNITS
project, a group of GNU maintainers who designed standardized tools to
help meet the GNU coding standards.
Created Wed Sep 1 16:41:58 2004 on bee with info_to_html version 0.9.6.