GNU tools used in gphoto2 and libgphoto2

popt

Being a command line tool that has to handle a plethora of command line options, gphoto2 uses the gnu popt library. See the popt(3) man page for details. Basically the way this works is a 3 step process:
  1. You set up a table to describe all of your command line options.
  2. You instantiate a "context" to allow that table to process your command.
  3. You build a loop around poptGetNextOpt to process the options.

Automake and Autoconf

These are more gnu tools that make it possible to write and cope with highly portable software. If you have ever downloaded a package, then built it with the sequence: Then you have probably been reaping the benefits of this tool set.

Here are some links:

Libtool

Libtool is not as often used as the above pair, but for a package like libgphoto2 which is a library (in fact a set of shared libraries), it makes a lot of sense. Libtool aims to make building and using shared libraries platform independent.
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Tom's Digital Photography Info / tom@mmto.org