[gentoo-dev] Unofficial Gentoo Development Guide and Autotools

[Ciaran McCreesh]

It came to my attention during a recent discussion on -core that a
significant number of devs don't have a clue how autotools work and find
any kind of patching that involves tinkering with configure.ac /
Makefile.am level stuff to be very tricky. Clearly, this isn't good,
because a significant number of upstream devs don't have a clue what
they're doing either.

There was already a small autotools explanation in The Doc, but it was
very general. I've added substantially more content to it. Or, at least,
as much as I could think of from my limited experience with autotools.
The results:

http://www.firedrop.org.uk/devmanual/general-concepts/autotools/

What more would people like to see explained? Is there anything in there
that needs changing or clarifying? Anything that's just plain wrong?
Does it need a section on libtool and if so does someone want to explain
to me how the heck it works? Are there good examples of ebuilds which
make understandable changes to these things that I should be adding as
illustrations? Do you like the picture? Feedback please.

I've added, improved and fixed a fair number of other things in other
sections too (some of these thanks to content I've received from other
devs and not-yet-devs), so if your favourite section had a big fat TODO
on it last time you looked it may be worth checking again. And if it
still has a big fat TODO, feel free to contribute :)

http://www.firedrop.org.uk/devmanual/

If anyone wants me to stop talking about my unofficial developer manual
on the official gentoo mailing lists, feel free to say so. Or just
procmail anything containing 'devmanual' in the body.

-- 
Ciaran McCreesh : Gentoo Developer (Vim, Shell tools, Fluxbox, Cron)
Mail            : ciaranm at gentoo.org
Web             : http://dev.gentoo.org/~ciaranm