Way back in 2009, Monty Taylor got fed up with maintaining a set of common autotools foo across several projects (one of which was Drizzle) and started the pandora-build project.  Basically, it’s a collection of the foo you need for autotools to do things like: use it properly, detect a bunch of common libraries, enable crap-tons of compiler warnings (and -Werror) and write an application/library with plugins (that are auto-discovered and built).

(and don’t worry, there’s also modes to disable -Werror and different compiler warnings if you’re working on an old code base that really doesn’t build cleanly)

There’s also templates for Quickly to get you up and started really quickly.

Basically, for the past 3 years, whenever I’ve gone to write some small project (or got sufficiently annoyed with the broken build system on an old one), I’ve turned to pandora-build to solve my problems.

Recently, I’ve had the need to use the plugin infrastructure of pandora-build in a new project (I’ve used it extensively in Drizzle of course). The one bit that pandora does not take care of for you is the dlopen() code to load plugins at run time… although I do wonder about turning some of that code into a bit of a library just because a bunch of it is pretty common….

Of course, a task for me is to write up a blog post on how I did it all, but for the moment I thought I’d just share :)