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Christopher Negus

"Linux Bible, 2008 Edition: Boot up to Ubuntu, Fedora, KNOPPIX, Debian, openSUSE, and 11 Other Distributions"


When it comes to compilers, GCC is the compiler of choice, or, if you will, the choice of the GNU
generation, so this chapter discusses only GCC. Other compilers are available for Linux, such as
Intel??™s C and C++ compiler and a very powerful (and expensive) offering from the Portland Compiler
Group. Similarly, GDB, the GNU debugger, is the only debugger described in this chapter.
In Chapter 28, you examined the role that programming interfaces play in simplifying the development
task. Interfaces usually include one or more libraries that implement the functionality that
interfaces define. Because you need to be able to work with programming libraries, utilities for
creating, examining, and manipulating libraries also occupy the well-stocked programming toolkit.
To this list, most developers would add a build automation tool, such as make, because most nontrivial
projects need some sort of utility that handles building and rebuilding complicated, multifile
projects with a minimum of effort and time.
Another challenge for large projects is tracking source code changes and maintaining a record of
what code changed, when it changed, how it changed, and who changed it. This task is the province
of source code control systems, and this chapter looks at two: RCS and CVS.


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