Hey guys, I apologize if this topic is in the wrong section of the forums, but let me know and I'll be happy to redirect my questions.

I am in the final stages of creating a game with Allegro 5.0.11. I have been searching through the packages released by other people that have created games using Allegro, and it looks like the easiest and most portable way to set up a build system is by using GNU autotools (autoconf, automake, libtools).

I am working through as many sources as I can trying to learn more about these autotools and how they could help in this process, but the information is too detailed in some cases and lacking information in other areas.

Is there anyone else that has prepared their project for distribution this way? If so, are there any pointers or resources that you could send my way?

I can write very basic makefiles, but checking that the end user has the allegro libraries and dumb and all of the other dependencies is beyond my knowledge.

My game is near completion and I would like to share it with the allegro community to be criticized, commented on, played, etc... Any help at all on the build process would be greatly appreciated.

Allegro Development forum is for developing allegro......

Now that's out of the way -

cmake seems to be a popular option these days. autotools seemed too daunting for me to ever try it. I need to come up with a build system too. Another option is the premake build system, which is fairly simple and only requires you to install lua.

Okay that was more or less what I had in mind after reading the OP.

And in my first post was right about to suggest you looking into CMAKE, I am no expert and barely scratched the surface of it, but seems a solid choice, well documented, quite supported, easily maintanable.

It's also more portable than autotools, in my view.

Well okay, I may have been overly optimistic

Theres also http://scons.org

SCons has native support for gcc so you don't have to do anything to get it to work with mingw.

Build configurations are also a simple affair. You set up environments that control how the build takes place, i.e. which targets are built and what commands build them.

env = Environment()
env['CXX'] = 'clang++'
build_with(env)

env2 = Environment()
env['CXX'] = 'g++'
build_with(env2)

Thats pretty simplified but you get the idea. Actually scons is a bit hard to deal with. Its a lot like a complex framework so you have to learn the idiosyncracies of the framework to use it properly. CMake tends to be easier for 'simple' projects because it has more machinery out of the box, but scons is much more extensible because it uses a real language (python).