AutoGen is a tool designed to simplify the creation and maintenance of programs that contain large

amounts of repetitious text. It is especially valuable in programs that have several blocks of text that
must be kept synchronized.

AutoGen will accept either its own definition format, or XML files as definition input, in addition to CGI
data (for producing dynamic HTML) and traditional AutoGen definitions.

A common example where this would be useful is in creating and maintaining the code required for
processing program options. Processing options requires multiple constructs to be maintained in parallel
in different places in your program. Options maintenance needs to be done countless times. So,
AutoGen comes with an add-on package named AutoOpts that simplifies the maintenance and
documentation of program options.

AutoGen is known to work on GNU/Linux, BSD, Apple's OS/X, SVR4-5, HPUX, SCO OpenServer and
Solaris. It is expected that it will work on any reasonably modern UNIX system with an ANSI-compliant C
compiler. It also runs under WinNT, provided you have CygWin and Guile loaded.

Items of interest:

The announcement for the AutoGen-5.18.6pre15 source distribution describes recent changes.
If you choose to download, please drop Bruce Korb a note and let me know if you built it and
what you used it for. Thank you. :)

Autogen code uses a tailored character map for determining which of twenty or so character
classes a particular character belongs to. Just using <ctypes.h> doesn't work so well for that
many categories. So, this generator was developed to create the mappings: char-mapper.

Here is some general information about code generators and template processors. A brief
quote:

A template processor (also known as a template engine or a template parser) is software or a software
component that is designed to combine one or more templates with a data model to produce one or
more result documents.

AutoGen is listed there as "complex". :)

An interesting article from Computer World

Autoconf configuration macros can be created with an online form. The resulting macro may be
added directly to your aclocal.m4 file, or the AutoGen definitions may be copied aside and the
macro regenerated, should the conftest template be updated. This template is distributed with
AutoGen. NOTE:This form is temporarily out of service. It must be rebuilt due to server
upgrades...
 AutoGen development is hosted on GNU's Savannah Site. The development page is in
projects/autogen. People interested in AutoGen are encouraged to download the CVS sources
and provide input.

Contacting Development:

o Mailing lists make life easier for tracking general issues,

o bug reports can be filed here, and

o feature requests can be filed here.

The full documentation is available online here. But be aware that it is the full documentation,
intended as a reference. For just learning to understand AutoGen, the introduction has a
purpose section and a simple example. For handy reference, Source Forge has a Google link to
help you search the documentation.

A FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) is available online.

The AutoGen distribution now comes with a ``make package'' rule that will create a native
binary package for Solaris and Linux platforms. I'd like to do the same for Debian, Fink and other
platforms, too.

AutoOpts 41.1, a semi-automated command line option parser, is included with AutoGen
5.18.6pre15. It automatically generates everything you need for option processing, including
man pages and an "invoking" chapter for your texinfo document. There is a separate AutoOpts
chapter in the AutoGen doc, complete with a quick-start section. Online, there is a command
line option parser Feature Comparison.

Be aware that this chapter is the complete reference doc for AutoOpts, so don't let it overwhelm you.

AutoOpts incorporates a configuration file parser library. This functionality supports AutoOpts
features and is also available separately through configFileLoad(3AutoOpts) and a selected
subset of libopts exported functions.

blocksort is a separately downloadable module that you can use as an example of how to
integrate the libopts library component of AutoOpts in your project. The above referenced page
also gives information on how to simply use AutoOpts.

All that notwithstanding, some folks do not want to mess with dependencies on external libraries. There
is now help for you, too: getopt(3C) and getopt_long(3GNU) can parse the AutoOpts options instead of
the libopts library. It significantly reduces the set of available features, though.

AutoFSM, a finite state machine generator, is included with AutoGen. It automatically generates
easy-to-follow tables and a prototype implementation of a Finite State Machine.
 The snprintfv formatting library is included in the AutoGen distribution. It is a replacement for
stdio formatting library. It is a fully portable, consistent and extensible formatting library that
replaces the standard printf(3) collection of routines.

AutoGen is licensed under the terms of the GPL. However, whatever it produces is the result of
the work of creating the appropriate template. In other words, the template author is
responsible for choosing the license for the use of that template. My AutoGen-related projects
use the following licenses:

o AutoOpts is licensed under the GPL, with the exception that it is allowed to be linked
with non-free programs. See the text for fuller details.

o AutoFSM generates Finite State Machines that are licensed under the BSD license, sans
the advertising clause.

o AutoXDR is public domain.

o fixincludes is part of GCC, so it is GPL-ed and donated to the FSF.

o AutoEvents is undecided, but likely BSD.

GCC's FixIncludes was rewritten to make it far, far simpler to specify and maintain system
header file edits required by GCC.

AutoXDR is a project for augmenting the rpcgen interface. NFSv4 adopted protocols that cannot
be directly supported via rpcgen. They combine RPC calls in order to save network traffic. This is
a useful enhancement, but you have to marshall and unmarshall your own arguments. With
minor reformatting of the ONC IDL and using this program, it is possible to generate the
procedures that will do all of this for you. You can get this here.

The AutoEvents project is underway, making incredibly slow progress. It is a means for
automatically maintaining infrastructure for managing the creation, storage, dispatching and
displaying of events. For most large projects, it is necessary to coordinate the display and
routing of software-initiated messages. This scheme completely alleviates the programmers
from the need of making source changes in the event there are changes in central policy. (It
happens.)

It also handles much, but not all, of the drudgery of maintaining, managing and triggering these events.
(In case you want common methods for enabling and disabling them, and deciding on throttling
policies.)

This is not ready yet. It is just coming, eventually.

Acknowledgements

This program has evolved over a period of several years. During that time, Gary V. Vaughan has been a
tremendous help in making it more portable, setting up the regression tests and building an entire
formatting library because vsprintf was unportable. Thank you!
Also, thanks to Daniel Schregenberger for providing code and impetus for implementing GNU-ish usage
text for AutoOpts.

Please direct any questions, comments, suggestions or anything else to the author, Bruce Korb.

AutoGen, AutoOpts, columns, getdefs, AutoFSM, AutoXDR and these web pages copyright (c) 1999-2012
Bruce Korb, all rights reserved.
snprintfv and its documentation copyright (c) 1999, 2000 Gary V. Vaughan, all rights reserved.

fixincludes copyright (c) 1999-2012 the Free Software Foundation, all rights reserved.
AutoXDR copyright (c) 2000-2012 Bruce Korb, all rights reserved.
Return to GNU's home page.

Please send FSF & GNU inquiries & questions to gnu@gnu.org. There are also other ways to contact the
FSF.

Please send comments on these web pages to webmasters@www.gnu.org, send other questions to
gnu@gnu.org.

This article, Copyright 2000-2002 by Bruce Korb

Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium, provided this notice
is preserved. Last modified: Fri Aug 21 14:20:33 PDT 2015Lorem Ipsum Generator

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