Configure

Configure is my own autoconfigure script for C programs, something like the GNU autoconf program, except that it’s

• free,
• written in bourne shell (with functions; the old v7 shells won’t work),
• doesn’t use config.cache files,
• doesn’t require that you install a huge GNU toolchain to do anything with it.

Configure is not nearly as complete as autoconf, because I’m only adding things to it as I need them.

Currently, configure is used in most of the code I write (and it’s been shoehorned into my copies of libgd and dropbear) because it’s being built for macos-current, RHELCentos-current, and FreeBSD 4.1 (if I set up a VM for Mastodon Linux, I will fire up an ancient pell image and try building for SLS Linux as well.) Levee, Magicfilter, ndialog, xrpm, Postoffice, cwatch, markdown, and annotations end up using most of the features in configure, and I tend to test new features out in one of those projects and then pull it back into the baseline before spinning it out everywhere else to see if it makes other code fail.

Source Code

• v0.62 – after a decade for the code to mature – is a rollup release for 10 years of incremental changes to the autoconfiguration process as modern Unices gaze more deeply into their own navels. Documentation is being worked on, but it is not finished so you’re stuck with looking at the configure.sh examples in the code listed above.

• v0.59, is, as you can probably guess, a rollup of a bunch of tiny feature-ettes. It contains:

  1. More support for --srcdir.
  2. When configure.sh is run, it creates a config.md script that is used to create directory trees in a hopefully portable manner.
  3. Add the AC_SCALAR_TYPES function, which creates types for 32 (DWORD), 16(WORD), and 8(BYTE) bit scalars.
  4. Add the prefix AC_QUIET, which makes a detect function run without any output.
  5. Add the AC_CHECK_STRUCT function, which checks for the existance of a structure.
  6. Add the AC_PROG_AWK function, which checks for the existance of awk.
  7. Add the AC_INCLUDE function, which adds a #include to config.h.
  8. Add the AC_CHECK_RESOLVER function, which looks for a bind4 compatable version of the Berkeley resolver library.

• v0.53 starts adding configure-side support for --srcdir (installing a package in one directory and building it in a different directory.) This isn’t documented yet (because it’s actually fairly complicated, and hasn’t been tested anywhere except Linux and FreeBSD, but it roughly works as follows; in your Makefile.in’s, you set VPATH = @srcdir@, define your own makefile rules so that .c.o: puts .o files out in the current directory (Berkeley make does this automatically, GNU make does not), modify your compilation rules so they include things from @srcdir@/{place} instead of simple {place}, and finally when you publish a release of your software, running joincfg.sh to collapse configure.inc and configure.sh together. (the magicfilter package does this from version 2.2.i onwards.)

• v0.51 defines a OS_<type> variable in config.h and configure.sh, and defines the substitions @CONFIGURE_FILES@ (the files created by configure.sh) and @GENERATED_FILES@ (the files generated from .in files during AC_OUTPUT.)

• v0.4 fixes a little bug in the generation of the config.cmd file; CC and CFLAGS were not being quoted properly on some platforms.

• v0.3 has a few changes in configure.inc that make it work on Solaris and SLS Linux. I’ve also added an install_manpages script that can be used to do what you’d expect it to do.

• v0.2 has more detail in the HOWTO and some tweaks to make it work better on Irix machines.

• v0.1 has a minimal testsuite, a small samples directory, and the beginnings of a HOWTO file to tell you how it’s done.