AutoGen: The Automated Text and Program Generation Tool

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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.

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 Linux, BSD, 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 loaded.

Please go to the AutoGen page on Source Forge for an up to date version. FTP can no longer be used to keep this site current. Sorry. :-(

Items of interest:

The announcment for the 5.2.11 release of AutoGen 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 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.
Please make use of the mailing lists, as it helps to keep track of issues that get raised.
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.
AutoOpts 11.0 is included with AutoGen 5.2.11. It automatically generates everything you need for option processing. Plus, it will generate man pages and the "invoking" chapter for your texinfo document. There is a separate AutoOpts chapter in the AutoGen doc, complete with a quick-start section and a "competitive feature analysis". Be aware that this chapter is the complete reference doc for AutoOpts, so don't let it overwhelm you.
AutoFSM is included with AutoGen. It automatically generates easy-to-follow tables and a prototype implementation of a Finite State Machine.
AutoGen distribution includes a replacement for stdio formatting library: the snprintfv formatting package. It is a fully portable, consistent and extensible formatting library that replaces the standard printf(3) collection of routines.
The current version of FixIncludes for the GNU GCC compiler was written using AutoGen.
There is a project for augmenting the XDR/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.
I also have the beginnings of an automated extraction of software 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!

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, 2000, 2001 Bruce Korb, all rights reserved.
snprintfv and its documentation copyright (c) 1999, 2000 Gary V. Vaughan, all rights reserved.

fixincludes copyright (c) 1999, 2001 the Free Software Foundation, all rights reserved.
AutoXDR copyright (c) 2000 Bruce Korb, all rights reserved.