# $Id: README,v 1.12 2005/08/21 22:21:17 joostvb Exp $
This is a package holding a book titled "Autoconf, Automake, Libtool" aka The
Autobook: a tutorial for the GNU Autotools by Gary V. Vaughan, Ben Elliston,
Tom Tromey and Ian Lance Taylor: some of the principal Autotools developers.
The Autotools -- Autoconf, Automake and Libtool -- are packages for making your
software more portable and to simplify building it -- usually on someone else's
system. The book describes how these tools work together.
The official Autobook webpage is at http://sources.redhat.com/autobook/ .
The book is published on paper by New Riders (ISBN 1-57870-190-2), their
webpage on the book is at http://www.newriders.com/autoconf/ .
Until 2001-09-05, this package was maintained by Gary V. Vaughan, Tom Tromey,
Ian Lance Taylor and Ben Elliston. It was (and is) available via anonymous
cvs:
cvs -d :pserver:anoncvs@sources.redhat.com:/cvs/autobook login
Password is anoncvs
cvs -d :pserver:anoncvs@sources.redhat.com:/cvs/autobook co autobook
The sources there would build autobook-0.5a.tar.gz .
Furthermore, http://sources.redhat.com/autobook/autobook-1.4.tar.gz, a tarball
containing html pages, is linked to from http://sources.redhat.com/autobook/ .
Finally, a discussion board about the autobook is online at
http://www.andamooka.org/index.pl?section=autobook .
You'll like this unofficial version of the Autobook if you prefer to read the
book in PDF or Info format, and feel having HTML only is too limiting. I've
made some other changes to the sources I've found in the redhat.com CVS too;
see ChangeLog for the details. I maintain a webpage on
http://mdcc.cx/autobook/ .
This package is _not_ blessed by the maintainers of the official
autobook-1.4.tar.gz. Therefore, I take responsiblity for all errors you might
find in this package. Of course, all credit should go to Vaughan, Tromey,
Taylor and Elliston for their excellent work.
Beware! The Autobook is getting somewhat obsolete, I'm afraid: the text has
not been updated (apart from minor corrections) since 2001-09.
Tools needed for installation:
- sed
- m4
- texinfo's texi2dvi
- texinfo's texi2pdf
- perl
The rest of this file is what I've found in
cvs/sources.redhat.com/autobook.
Joost van Baal, Thu, 11 Aug 2005 22:18:06 +0200
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The toplevel wrapper which holds all this stuff together is the file
autobook.texi.
The book includes four files (one for each part) twice each, once to
populate the top level menu and again to include the body.
The makefile extracts the lines between ``@c %**start of menu'' and
``@c %**end of menu'' to insert on the first inclusion.
Subdivide the part.texi files into separate chapter files if you wish;
wrap any menu entries in a single ``@c %**'' pair in these sub files,
and ``@include file.menu'' in the part.texi file to have make extract
menu sections from individual files for @including while reading the
document source.
Just out of interest, it would be nice not to require an m4 pass over
the texi source, but it seems that my makeinfo can't handle auto-node
references (Next, Prev, Up) if I use texi @include for the menus and
subsections.