Autodafe 1.0 Released For Freeing Projects Of Autotools

Controversial free software developer Eric S Raymond has been spending a lot of time recently on the new Autodafe project as a means of free software projects from relying on Autotools. This "De-Autoconfiscation" has now led to the release of Autodafe 1.0 with the tool now being considered production-ready.

Autodafe's aim is to convert Autotools build recipes into a bare makefile that is human friendly. The Autodafe README file explains further:

"This project collects resources for converting an autotools build recipe to a bare makefile that can be read and modified by humans.
...
The deconfig tool walks the code tree of a project with an autotools build recipe looking for conditional-configuration symbols that can be removed because they gate C11 or POSIX facilities. It generates a diff that can be inspected and fed to patch(1) to remove the unneeded code. It also generates environment-discovery directives that can be used by autodafe configure.


The makemake tool reduces a generated Makefile to an equivalent form suitable for human modification and with internal automake cruft removed. It is intended to be used with deconfig to enable completely severing a project from its autotools build recipe, leaving a bare Makefile in place.

The configure tool replaces autotools configure, but is fast and comparatively tiny, small enough to be realistically audited. It interprets directives generated by deconfig and appended to your makefile to do discovery about the build environment."

Eric S Raymond further noted on Twitter/X:

"Autodafe 1.0 is finally here and production-ready, successfully tested in the real world on a large messy conversion even involving (yes!) shared libraries.

Convert your legacy build recipe today for increased security against supply-chain attacks, and an end to complexity nightmares.

Autotools delenda est!"

Those interested can find Autodafe 1.0 on GitLab.com.