Introduction to Free Software - SELF | Sharing Knowledge about ...

© FUOC • P07/M2101/02709 113 Free Software
Given the diversity of languages, character sets and cultural contexts, C pro-
grammers (and programmers using many other languages) often use gettext
(http://www.gnu.org/software/gettext) [31] and the internationalisation opti-
ons of the standard C library (http://www.gnu.org/software/libc) [34] for pro-
gramming applications that may be used easily in any cultural environment
and in the execution time.
Thus, when we receive a source package, it is most likely written in C, packaged
with tar, compressed with gzip, made portable with autoconf and associated
tools, and can be built and installed with make. Its installation will be carried
out in a very similar process to the following one:
tar xzvf package-1.3.5.tar.gz cd package-1.3.5 ./configure make make install
8.3. Integrated development environments
An IDE (integrated development environment) is a system that makes software
developer's work easier, by solidly integrating the edition oriented at the lan-
guage, the compilation or interpretation, debugging, performance measures,
incorporation of source code to a source control system, etc., normally in a
modular fashion.
Not all free software developers like these tools, although their use has gradu-
ally expanded. In the world of free software, the first one to be extensively
used was GNU Emacs (http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/) [33], star work
of Richard Stallman, written and extendable to Emacs Lisp, for which there
are mountains of contributions.
Eclipse (Eclipse - An Open Development Platform) [23] can be considered
today's reference IDE in the world of free software, with the disadvantage
that it works better (around May 2007) on a non-free virtual Java machine
(Sun's which is hoped to become free soon anyway). Other popular environ-
ments are Kdevelop (http://www.kdevelop.org) [42] for KDE, Anjuta (http://
www.anjuta.org) [6] for GNOME, Netbeans (http://www.netbeans.org) [51] of
Sun for Java and Code::Blocks (http://www.codeblocks.org) [18] for C++ ap-
plications.
8.4. Basic collaboration mechanisms
Free software is a phenomenon made possible by the collaboration of distribu-
ted communities and that, therefore, requires tools to make that collaboration
effective. Although for a long time magnetic tapes were physically posted, the
speedy development of free software began once it became possible to com-
municate rapidly with many people and to distribute program codes to them
or reply with comments and patches. For convenience, rather than sending