I'll create the root makefile that invokes AutoCMake, then CMake, then Make and then all the edge cases CMake can't handle, plus add a much more usable interface.... Take out AutoCMake and it's actually what I'm doing right now.
> Yes, m4 macros are back in the game again!
Actually, I did some codegen experiments recently and found M4 to be really nice once you get past the bad documentation and actually understand it, along with ignoring any experiences with autotools of course. Besides the general substitutions and macros, the divert/undivert primitives are simple yet this is where the real power of the language is, they easily let you write to a number of named/numbered buffers and then pull them back in where needed. The wikipedia article probably shows this off more clearly than the documentation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M4_(computer_language)
Like most gnu projects, the manual is very good, the problem is it's a manual and just a reference for looking up specific things, it doesn't really explain how to use m4. I'm not sure if this is by design or lack of effort in that direction.
Take divert for instance like a mentioned above, it's one of the foundations that make m4 good but it's not mentioned until chapter 10 and even then the examples are hard to follow and not particularly good, they could have gone with something more real world:
define(INDEX, 1)
define(BODY, 2)
define(ADD_CHAPTER, heading, text
divert(INDEX)
heading
divert(BODY)
heading
text
)
#guts of the generation go here
ADDCHAPTER('one', 'paragraph one')
ADDCHAPTER('two', 'paragraph two')
undivert(INDEX)
unidvert(BODY)
The syntax there isn't correct, but I think an example like that shows off how and why you'd use this feature more than the examples in the documentation.
