# $Id: README,v 1.5 2004/03/16 07:27:21 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-1.3.tar.gz, a tarball
containing html pages, is linked to from http://sources.redhat.com/autobook/ .

I've made some changes to the sources I've found in the redhat.com CVS  (see
ChangeLog), and maintain the sources via CVS on topaz.conuropsis.org.  I
maintain a webpage on http://mdcc.cx/autobook/ , the package can be downloaded
from there.

This package is _not_ blessed by the maintainers of autobook-1.3.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.
Autobook talks likely about autoconf version 2.13, automake version 1.4 and
libtool version 1.3.5 (see Appendix A.2: Downloading GNU Autotools).  As of
january 2004, released are autoconf 2.59, automake 1.8 and libtool 1.5.
Therefore, regard the texinfo documentation shipped with these tools as the
authoritive source of information.

The rest of this file is what I've found in
cvs/sources.redhat.com/autobook.

                     Joost van Baal, Tue, 16 Mar 2004 08:09:09 +0100

-------------------------------------------------------------------


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.
