I've just fixed a bunch of problems with how I had the GNU Autotools set up which were breaking compilation.
Basically, it turns out that $LDFLAGS is not the variable you want to put things like -lfltk to get them passed to the linker - for that you use $LDADD. The difference is which side of filename.o the variable is placed, which is something the linker cares about. Mine didn't used to care, or the autotools used to fix it for me. When your build environment silently ceases silently fixing a mistake you didn't know you were making, you get baffled. Thanks to linuxquestions.org for pointing out the ordering issue, after which Google® led me to $LDADD.
Meanwhile, I got a newer version of g++, and AX_CXX_COMPILE_STDCXX_0X reports that I now have access to c++11 (formerly known as c++0x) features, provided that I pass one of two compiler options to g++. This macro is also helpfully defining the symbol which tells the preprocessor not to replace nullptr with 0. Much to my surprise, it did not helpfully insert the option which is required for c++11 support into CXXFLAGS, and so introduced a compilation failure.
I thus set out to write myself an m4 macro to handle the possible necessity of such an option. This is hard to do when you have no experience and the Internet is surprisingly reluctant to produce autotools tutorials that amount to more than presenting extremely basic configure.ac and Makefile.am files and telling you that these files do stuff for you. The generally accepted best source appears to be slides for a lecture. So far as I can tell, these are slides from a fine lecture. However, they don't stand up all that well on their own.
Thankfully, I've finally found a serious introduction to the autotools. I strongly recommend that anyone who intends to write c/c++ programs in unixkin environments read it and use the autotools. For all that I've suffered for them, Unit Testris would be unmanagable without them.
