"The good news about computers is that they do what you tell them to do. The bad news is that they do what you tell them to do."

-- unsure; often attributed without source to information philosopher Ted Nelson

Software development guidelines by Ken Gaillot

Summary of development tools

A minimal useful development environment includes:

• a standard C compiler and library such as gcc and glibc
• a standard C++ compiler and library such as gcc and libstdc++
• a Bourne-compatible shell such as bash
• a Perl interpreter
• an m4 macro processor such as GNU m4
• an implementation of make such as GNU make
• a text editor such as emacs
• an archiver such as GNU tar
• a compressor such as gzip
• an implementation of man page formatters such as groff

Other generally useful tools:

• a debugger such as gdb
• version control software like cvs
• autoconf and automake for installation and portability
• a GUI toolkit such as GTK+ and GNOME
• devtree for building development trees following these guidelines

Tools useful for specific purposes:

• popt for command-line argument processing
• readline library for interactive command-line input
• ncurses for screen-based user interface
• info and texinfo for documentation support for GNU formats
• DocBook tools for documentation support for many formats
• gettext for native language support
• libtool for portable shared libraries
• cryptological signature software such as PGP or GPG