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[ANNOUNCE] Confix 1.0.1 released


From: Joerg Faschingbauer
Subject: [ANNOUNCE] Confix 1.0.1 released
Date: Mon, 27 Jan 2003 11:26:58 +0100 (CET)

What the hell is Confix?
------------------------

Confix is a build tool for source code packages. It doesn't require
the package maintainer to write any build instructions at all by
hand. Instead, it examines the source code, guesses what's to be done
and writes the build instructions for the maintainer. Another
important feature - perhaps the most important - is the ability of
Confix to recognize and compute package dependencies. That is, it
relieves the package maintainer of the task of manually keeping track
of the order in which libraries appear on the link line of an
executable, for example, or of the build order inside the package.

Confix is built on top of the standard open source tool Automake. That
is, the build instructions generated by Confix are in fact Automake
input files. This way one uses the whole infrastructure supplied by
Automake, involving such things as the well-known "configure; make;
make install" sequence, or automatically building source distributions
by simply saying "make dist", just to mention a few.

What is Release 1.0.1?
----------------------

Release 1.0.1 is a bugfix release upon release 1.0.0. It adds no
functionality, only a handful of bugs were fixed. See the release
notes.

Where can I get it?
-------------------

Confix is hosted at Sourceforge.net. The project's summary page is
http://sourceforge.net/projects/confix, which is where you can
download releases. Confix's homepage is
http://confix.sourceforge.net. Documentation can be found in the
source release package, and is also available online from the
homepage.

Future directions
-----------------

- Better integration of explicit build instructions

  Confix's normal mode of operation is to generate build instructions
  automatically from the package source, without any explicit
  statements from the package maintainer. To make Confix recognize
  things unambiguously, a few rules are imposed on the package source
  code. Sometimes it is not possible to obey these rules, for example
  when you are converting the build process of existing code to use
  Confix. For this purpose Confix provides interfaces for the
  maintainer's explicitly written build instructions which override
  Confix's wild guesses.

  Currently, wild guesses and explicit statements do not integrate
  well. You cannot use both. The goal is to make it work as
  expected. For example it should be possible to let Confix guess
  basic properties, and then to override certain properties
  explicitly.

- Generating code with Confix

  Automake has the feature of handling generated source files (see the
  BUILT_SOURCES variable in Automake). However, you have to know the
  names and the number of the generated files to make use of this
  feature. When you generate, say, C++ header and implementation files
  from a UML diagram, you wouldn't want to keep your BUILT_SOURCES
  list consistent with the classes in the diagram. In other words,
  code generation like this is not easily handled with stock Automake
  features.

  The goal is to supply interfaces that make it easy to embed code
  generators of this type into Confix. The code generation would take
  place before Confix scans the package's source, and the generated
  files would look to the scanner as if the user had written them.




Comments, suggestions and laughter are greatly appreciated. Please
direct them to address@hidden

Joerg Faschingbauer




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