Re: A Closer Look at GNU AutoTools

[Gary V. Vaughan]

> On Sep 5, 2014, at 12:34 PM, Henrique de Moraes Holschuh <address@hidden> 
> wrote:
> 
>> On Fri, 05 Sep 2014, Hartmut Holzgraefe wrote:
>> * the good old "Goats Book" which is also available online, and seems
>>  to have received an update lately:
>> 
>>    https://www.sourceware.org/autobook/autobook/autobook_toc.html
>> 
>>  I still refer to my paper copy every once in a while, but by now
>>  that one's so old that a lot of things need to be cross-checked
>>  against current autotools documentation
> 
> This one is available under the OPL v1.0 with no extra options
> (http://opencontent.org/openpub/).
> 
> It was updated in 2006 to address autoconf-2.59, automake-1.9.6, libtool
> 1.5.22.  This _should_ be fresh enough to be useful.
> 
> If someone looks it over and states that it is indeed useful for recent
> autotools, I believe a pointer to this book should be added to the autotools
> (autoconf, automake, libtool) websites.
> 
> In fact, the Debian project had it packaged in "non-free" for quite a
> while[1].  It was removed in 2008, because "non-free" was carrying the
> "unofficial" 1.4.4 edition from http://mdcc.cx/autobook/, which is obsolete
> as it was never updated to the 1.5 official release.
> 
> 
> [1] The Debian DFSG when applied to documentation is more restrictive than
> the GNU free documentation license guidelines.  The autobook complies to the
> GNU requirements for a free documentation license, at least according to
> http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#FreeDocumentationLicenses
> since no options of the OPL were exercised in the autobook license.

I've been meaning to make the time to update The Goat Book to latest autotools 
for a few years, maybe even a complete overhaul for a 2ed.  But it keeps 
slipping down my TODO.

I'll see if I can get it moved to Savannah presently, and in the mean time 
patches, corrections or even reports of examples that are broken or otherwise 
misleading with current releases would be enough to prompt me into taking the 
first few bites if the elephant.

Cheers,
-- 
Gary V. Vaughan (gary AT gnu DOT org)