Question

What I want to do is to create a new shared library called libxxx that links against another shared library called libzzz, this shared library has an independent “pkg-config”-like tool, let’s say it’s called “zzz-config” which gives the cflags needed by the compilation phase when using the libzzz.
What I want to do is:

• Create configure/makefile, etc.. using autotools like automake, autoconf, etc;
• It must use the zzz-config script cited above;
• It must generate automatic dependencies for sources;
• It must have a mode for building debug (with no optimization) and release (with optimizations) builds;
• The sources are in C++;
• It must target for a shared library;
• It must read sources for a src directory and put compiled files in another directory

I’ve read almost all available tutorials for autotools but I was not able to figure a way to do that, if you can point some example would be very kindly.

Thank you !

Answer 1

My suggestion is to use CMake instead of autotools. It’s much easier to work with and it will also create platform-dependent projects to work with (i.e. Makefile-based projects, Visual Studio projects, Eclipse CDT projects, etc.).

It will also create debug or release projects, depending on the CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE variable value.

Creating the libxxx library is as simple as:

add_library(libxxx SHARED ${LIBXXX_SOURCES})

where LIBXXX_SOURCES is a variable that holds the sources.

Linking the two libraries is just as easy (see target_link_libraries):

target_link_libraries(libxxx libzzz)

To get the compilation flags from the zzz-config script you would use the execute_process command like so:

execute_process(COMMAND ./zzz-config 
                WORKING_DIRECTORY "<your_working_directory>"
                OUTPUT_VARIABLE ZZZ_FLAGS)

Then you can set the CMAKE_C_FLAGS or the CMAKE_CXX_FLAGS variable to setup the required compilation flags.