Autotools on Lloyd Rochester's Geek Blog

Systemd and Autotools

Mon, 22 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Systemd and Autotools

This post starts a tutorial series on how to create a systemd service in Linux. This first post is likely the hardest part as we create an autotools project with the source code and systemd unit files. Having this setup in autotools saves significant time installing unit files that systemd requires, building our C code, installing, and uninstalling our program. If you can get through this first post the following posts should come easily.

Flex/Bison Autotools Project Creation

Tue, 25 Jun 2019 11:15:00 +0000

Let’s create a basic Flex/Bison Project with Autotools. The GNU Documentation for Automake specifies Flex/Bison Support. We will take it a step further and provide a complete example with a Flex Scanner and Bison parser.

See the previous post Autotools Project Create Template. This allows us to create a boilerplate Autotools project. Then we can add the Flex/Bison support on top of the basic autotools project.

Let’s create a project called fbbasic with the Autotools Project Creation Template:

Autotools Project Creation Template

Mon, 24 Jun 2019 07:26:00 +0000

Autotools Project Creation Template

This post has a simple bash script to create a basic Hello World autotools project with a single command. The justification for this autotools script is I’ve not seen a consolidated script that keeps it simple in one place. The script creates a boiler plate autotools hello world project. Here is what it does:

Creation of configure.ac with project name, version, and email
Creation of root Makefile.am which just points to the src/Makefile.am
Creation of src/Makefile.am which will make a binary and has a single source file main.c
Creation of a autogen.sh which will run autoreconf --install
Creation of a .gitignore so we know what autotools files should be under version control
Creation of a main.c which just prints “hello world” to stdout.

After we have created the files above all we need to do is run a ./autogen.sh and our project will be ready to run the infamous ./configure, make and make install.

Autotools Hello World

Thu, 30 May 2019 14:46:00 +0000

Autotools Hello World

Don’t Listen to the Autotools Haters

Being an avid C and Unix Geek, I decided to ignore all the hate out there about GNU Autotools and try it for myself. For those of you that don’t know the GNU Autotools suite consists of Autoconf, Automake and Libtool. You’ll see some major criticisms out there from people saying it’s way too complex, challenging, hard to use as well as all sorts of other criticisms. Let’s face it though, build systems are complex. I’ve used all sorts of them. Communities love to re-invent the wheel and build their own tool but at the end of the day to support everything is a massive endeavor.