What the hell is Confix? ------------------------ Confix is a build tool for source code packages. It doesn't require the package maintainer to write any build instructions at all by hand. Instead, it examines the source code, guesses what's to be done and writes the build instructions for the maintainer. Another important feature - perhaps the most important - is the ability of Confix to recognize and compute package dependencies. That is, it relieves the package maintainer of the task of manually keeping track of the order in which libraries appear on the link line of an executable, for example, or of the build order inside the package.
Confix is built on top of the standard open source tool Automake. That is, the build instructions generated by Confix are in fact Automake input files. This way one uses the whole infrastructure supplied by Automake, involving such things as the well-known "configure; make; make install" sequence, or automatically building source distributions by simply saying "make dist", just to mention a few. What is Release 1.0.1? ---------------------- Release 1.0.1 is a bugfix release upon release 1.0.0. It adds no functionality, only a handful of bugs were fixed. See the release notes. Where can I get it? ------------------- Confix is hosted at Sourceforge.net. The project's summary page is http://sourceforge.net/projects/confix, which is where you can download releases. Confix's homepage is http://confix.sourceforge.net. Documentation can be found in the source release package, and is also available online from the homepage. Future directions ----------------- - Better integration of explicit build instructions Confix's normal mode of operation is to generate build instructions automatically from the package source, without any explicit statements from the package maintainer. To make Confix recognize things unambiguously, a few rules are imposed on the package source code. Sometimes it is not possible to obey these rules, for example when you are converting the build process of existing code to use Confix. For this purpose Confix provides interfaces for the maintainer's explicitly written build instructions which override Confix's wild guesses. Currently, wild guesses and explicit statements do not integrate well. You cannot use both. The goal is to make it work as expected. For example it should be possible to let Confix guess basic properties, and then to override certain properties explicitly. - Generating code with Confix Automake has the feature of handling generated source files (see the BUILT_SOURCES variable in Automake). However, you have to know the names and the number of the generated files to make use of this feature. When you generate, say, C++ header and implementation files from a UML diagram, you wouldn't want to keep your BUILT_SOURCES list consistent with the classes in the diagram. In other words, code generation like this is not easily handled with stock Automake features. The goal is to supply interfaces that make it easy to embed code generators of this type into Confix. The code generation would take place before Confix scans the package's source, and the generated files would look to the scanner as if the user had written them. Comments, suggestions and laughter are greatly appreciated. Please direct them to [EMAIL PROTECTED] Joerg Faschingbauer
