GNU Info

(autoconf.info)Numbers

---

Next: Deuteronomy Prev: Leviticus Up: History

---

Enter node , (file) or (file)node

Numbers
=======

   In July 1992, after months of alpha testing, I released Autoconf 1.0,
and converted many GNU packages to use it.  I was surprised by how
positive the reaction to it was.  More people started using it than I
could keep track of, including people working on software that wasn't
part of the GNU Project (such as TCL, FSP, and Kerberos V5).  Autoconf
continued to improve rapidly, as many people using the `configure'
scripts reported problems they encountered.

   Autoconf turned out to be a good torture test for M4 implementations.
UNIX `m4' started to dump core because of the length of the macros that
Autoconf defined, and several bugs showed up in GNU `m4' as well.
Eventually, we realized that we needed to use some features that only
GNU M4 has.  4.3BSD `m4', in particular, has an impoverished set of
builtin macros; the System V version is better, but still doesn't
provide everything we need.

   More development occurred as people put Autoconf under more stresses
(and to uses I hadn't anticipated).  Karl Berry added checks for X11.
david zuhn contributed C++ support.  Franc,ois Pinard made it diagnose
invalid arguments.  Jim Blandy bravely coerced it into configuring GNU
Emacs, laying the groundwork for several later improvements.  Roland
McGrath got it to configure the GNU C Library, wrote the `autoheader'
script to automate the creation of C header file templates, and added a
`--verbose' option to `configure'.  Noah Friedman added the
`--autoconf-dir' option and `AC_MACRODIR' environment variable.  (He
also coined the term "autoconfiscate" to mean "adapt a software package
to use Autoconf".)  Roland and Noah improved the quoting protection in
`AC_DEFINE' and fixed many bugs, especially when I got sick of dealing
with portability problems from February through June, 1993.