CFL - The Configuration File Library

Introduction

The Configuration File Library (CFL) is a collection of routines for manipulating configuration files. It is a portable library fully written from scratch in pure ANSI C. It is designed to offer for C programmers common routines for manipulating configuration text files.

The current version is CFL-1.1. It was released on April 24, 2007.

You can download it from http://download.gna.org/cfl/.

CFL is free software distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License.

Functionality

CFL provides a modern Applications Programming Interface (API) for C programmers, while allowing wrappers to be written for very high level languages.

Further information can be found in the CFL Documentation.

Documentation

The CFL Reference Manualis available online, in following formats:

Supported Platforms

CFL is developed on Debian GNU/Linux with gcc. It should build on any GNU/linux distribution with gcc. GDSL has been tested with success under the following distributions:

Debian
Mandrake
RedHat

We require that CFL should build on any system with an ANSI C compiler, so if doesn't, that's a bug and we would love a patch!

Requirements

CFL needs GDSL library to work. GDSL could be found on http://home.gna.org/gdsl/

Download it

You can download the latest version of the distribution from the following site:

http://download.gna.org/cfl/

CVS Access

You can also check out the very latest version via anonymous cvs. Here's how:

cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.gna.org:/cvs/cfl co cfl

Once you have it checked out, you can update it with cvs update.

You can also view the cvs archive via cvsweb.

Note: if you use anonymous CVS, you will need some GNU tools that usually only developers use, and which are not required to build GNU packages from tarballs. These are automake, autoconf, libtool, GNU m4, GNU make, and others which might escape me now. They all come with recent GNU/Linux distributions, and for other OSes they can be found at ftp://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/

To begin the build process from a CVS checkout, start with:

./autogen.sh

which will prepare the package for compilation. You can then use ./configure and make in the usual way.

Mailing lists

There are several mailing lists available,

cfl-announce is a low volume mailing list for cfl release announcements
cfl-general is a mailing list for asking questions, reporting bugs, etc.

These mailing lists are archived here,

cfl-announce mailing list archive
cfl-general mailing list archive

To subscribe to the cfl-announce mailing list, go to http://mail.gna.org/listinfo/cfl-announce/.

To subscribe to the cfl-general mailing list, go to http://mail.gna.org/listinfo/cfl-general/.

Authors and Credits

This list of authors who have directly contributed to CFL is available in the AUTHORS file.

Licensing

CFL is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL).

The reasons why CFL uses the GPL are described in the following articles:

Copyleft: Pragmatic Idealism by Richard Stallman
Why you should not use the Library GPL for your next library by Richard Stallman

Contact Information

If you have a problem, or have found a bug, please visit the Gna! CFL homepage at http://gna.org/projects/cfl/ to send a note to the authors.

Last modified: Tue Apr 24 14:02:26 CEST 2007