# $Id: README,v 1.7 2004/05/23 18:01:43 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/ .  Technical
reviewers of the paper book were Akim Demaille, Phil Edwards, Bruce Korb,
Alexandre Oliva, Didier Verna, Benjamin Koznik and Jason Molenda.  The paper
book includes Acknowlegements to: Richard Stallman and the FSF, Gord
Matzigkeit, David Mackenzie, Akim Demaille, Phil Edwards, Bruce Korb, Alexandre
Oliva, Didier Verna, Benjamin Koznik, Jason Molenda, the Gnits group, and the
New Riders staff.

From the paper book, quoted from "About the Authors":

"Gary V. Vaughan spent three years as a Computer Systems Engineering
undergraduate at the University of Warwick and then two years at Coventry
Unversity studying Computer Science.  He has been employed as a professional C
programmer in several industry sectors for the past seven years, but most
recently as a scientist for the Defence Evaluation and Research Agency.  Over
the past 10 years or so, Gary has contributed to several free software
projects, including AutoGen, Cygwin, Enlightenment, and GNU M4.  He currently
helps maintain GNU Libtool for the Free Software Foundation.

Ben Elliston works at Red Hat Inc., telecommuting from his home in Canberra,
Australia.  He develops instruction set simulators and adapts the GNU
development tools to new microprocessors.  He has worked with GNU tools for
many years and is a past maintainer of GNU Autoconf.  He has a bachelor's
degree in Computer Engineering from the University of Canberra.

Tom Tromey works at Red Hat Inc., where he works on GCJ, the Java front end to
the GNU Compiler Collection.  Patches of his appear in GCC, emacs, Gnome,
Autoconf, GDB, and probably other packages he has forgotten about.  He is the
primary author of GNU Automake.

Ian Lance Taylor is co-founder and CTO of Zembu Labs.  Previously, he worked at
Cygnus Solutions, where he designed and wrote features and ports for many free
software programs, including the GNU Compiler Collection and the GNU binutils.
He was the maintainer of the GNU binutils for several years.  He is the author
of GNU/Taylor UUCP.  He was one of the first contributors to Autoconf, and has
also made significant contributions to Automake and Libtool."


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.  It also has instructions on how to get informed about changes to
the autobook package.

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.

See the unofficial Autobook webpage at http://mdcc.cx/autobook/ for pointers to
other sources of information on the GNU Autotools.

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

                     Joost van Baal,  Sun, 23 May 2004 16:05:39 +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.

