Damien Lespiau

Every now and then, you feel a big urge to start hacking on a small thingy and need to create Makefiles for it. Turns out that the autotools won’t be that intrusive when we are talking about small programs and you get do a reasonable job with a few lines, first the configure.ac file:

# autoconf
AC_PREREQ(2.59)
AC_INIT([fart], [0.0.1], [damien.lespiau@gmail.com])
AC_CONFIG_MACRO_DIR([build])
AC_CONFIG_AUX_DIR([build])
AC_CONFIG_SRCDIR([fart.c])
AC_CONFIG_HEADERS([config.h])

# automake
AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE([1.11 -Wall foreign no-define])
AM_SILENT_RULES([yes])

# Check for programs
AC_PROG_CC

# Check for header files
AC_HEADER_STDC

AS_COMPILER_FLAGS([WARNING_CFLAGS],
		  ["-Wall -Wshadow -Wcast-align -Wno-uninitialized
		   -Wno-strict-aliasing -Wempty-body -Wformat -Wformat-security
		   -Winit-self -Wdeclaration-after-statement -Wvla
		   -Wpointer-arith"])

PKG_CHECK_MODULES([GLIB], [glib-2.0 >= 2.24])

AC_OUTPUT([
  Makefile
])

and then Makefile.am:

ACLOCAL_AMFLAGS = -I build ${ACLOCAL_FLAGS}

bin_PROGRAMS = fart

fart_SOURCES =	fart.c
fart_CFLAGS  = $(WARNING_CFLAGS) $(GLIB_CFLAGS)
fart_LDADD   = $(GLIB_LIBS)

After that, it’s just a matter of running autoreconf

$ autoreconf -i

and you are all set!

So, what do you get for this amount of lines?

• The usual set of automake targets, handy! (“make tags” is so under used!) and bonus features (out of tree builds, extra rules to reconfigure/rebuild the Makefiles on changes in configure.ac/Makefile.an, …)
• Trying to make the autoconf/automake discreet (putting auxiliary files out of the way, silence mode, automake for non GNU projects)
• Some decent warning flags (tweak to your liking!)
• autoreconf cooperating with aclocal thanks to ACLOCAL_AMFLAGS and coping with non standard locations for system m4 macros

I’ll maintain a git tree to help bootstrap my next small hacks, feel free to use it as well!

My natural C indentation style is basically kernel-like and my ~/.vimrc reflects that. Unfortunately I have to hack on GNUish-style projects and I really don’t want to edit my ~/.vimrc every single time I switch between different indentation styles.

Modelines are evil.

To solve that terrible issue, vim can use per directory configuration files. To enable that neat feature only two little lines are needed in your ~/.vimrc:

set exrc			" enable per-directory .vimrc files
set secure			" disable unsafe commands in local .vimrc files

Then it’s just a matter of writing a per project .vimrc like this one:

set tabstop=8
set softtabstop=2
set shiftwidth=2
set expandtab
set cinoptions=>4,n-2,{2,^-2,:0,=2,g0,h2,t0,+2,(0,u0,w1,m1

You can find help with the wonderful cinoptions variable in the Vim documentation. As sane persons open files from the project’s root directory, this works like a charm. As for the Makefiles, they are special anyway, you really should add an autocmd in your ~/.vimrc.

" add list lcs=tab:>-,trail:x for tab/trailing space visuals
autocmd BufEnter ?akefile* set noet ts=8 sw=8 nocindent

Tired of writing this kind of lines by hand ?

* Mon Feb 09 2009 Damien Lespiau <damien.lespiau@xxxx.com> 1.4.3

This vim macro does just this for you!

nmap ,mob-ts :r!date +'\%a \%b \%d \%Y'<CR>0i* <ESC>$a Damien Lespiau <damien.lespiau@xxxx.com> FIXME