Managing Autotools

First off, sorry for so long without a post!

Managing autotools projects is a pain, whose only solace is knowing that managing projects with anything else is even worse. (I'm looking at you cmake, scons, xbuild, ant, nant, maven, gyp, etc). That's because being a build engineer is no easy task, despite it being thankless.

I had a thought the other day that it would be nice to have a command line tool to manage my automake projects. General stuff. So I started on one. It's called fig.

It doesn't do much yet. But if it continues to be made as a library, it could be useful as a command line tool and the basis for managing projects in some more complicated UI.

mkdir foobar && cd foobar

# Bootstrap a new project
fig init

# Add a new program target
fig add-target --program --name foobar

# Add a new gobject to foobar
fig add-gobject --target foobar FooBar

# Release a new version.
# Set version, make distcheck, git commit, tag, post-release bump.
fig release --version 0.2.0

Of course, not all of those commands are done. Just fig init at the moment.

The hope is to get it far enough soon to use it to build fig.

I'll see some of you soon in my hometown of San Francisco, CA for the first ever West Coast GNOME Summit!

Code here.

-- Christian Hergert 2014-03-20

Back to Index