Autotools template for C

This is a working and customizable template for C project using autotools.

The template includes several most needed features and it can be easily tweaked.

Features included in the template are:

• template code is vanilla C but C++ compiler is used
• Multi program and multi library
• program 1 (prog1) self contained, no library used
• program 2 (prog2) using 2 internal project libraries
• 1 Internal convenience library (just for organizational purposes) (lib1)
• 1 Shared Library (lib2)
• An external linked library (ncurses) used by the shared library. ncurses must be present available in order to compile the template as it is (sudo apt-get install libncurses5-dev)
• C program is statically linked to the internal library and dynamically linked to the installable one
• Program files and library files are organized into separate dirs
• Libtool is used
• Separate folders are used for:
  • build
  • m4 macros
  • src files
  • auxiliary autotool files
• INSTALL NEWS COPYING AUTHORS ChangeLog README files are not needed
• .gitignore excludes the automatically generated files

For developers

Customize the template package

• git clone the repo
• customize configure.ac and Makefile.am (optional)
• run autoreconf -i

build the package

mkdir build && cd build
../configure
make

To also make a tarball of source package

make dist

source distribution will be tarballed into <new project name>-<version>.tar.gz

For the package user

Build package

tar zxvf <new project name>-<version>.tar.gz
./configure
make

Run programs

./prog1
./prog2