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The GNU hello
program
(http://www.gnu.org/software/hello/) produces a familiar,
friendly greeting. It allows nonprogrammers to use a classic computer
science tool which would otherwise be unavailable to them. Because it
is protected by the GNU General Public License, users are free (in
perpetuity) to share and change it.
Not to spoil the joke, but of course the practical purpose of GNU Hello is to serve as a minimal example of a GNU package. So, although most manuals don’t need to discuss the implementation of the programs they document, that is part of the goal here.
First, GNU Hello follows the GNU coding standards (see Preface in GNU Coding Standards) and GNU maintainer standards (see Preface in Information for GNU Maintainers). These are the basic documents which all GNU packages should adhere to.
The Hello package also implements recommended development practices not embodied in the standards, using other GNU packages and features:
getopt_long
function
(see Getopt Long Options in GNU C Library) to parse options,
thus supporting GNU-style long options such as --help.
help2man
(see Overview in GNU help2man
) from the
--help output. This relieves the maintainers of the burden
of maintaining man documentation separately, yet provides a reasonable
overview for man devotees.
GNU Hello is implemented in C. GNU Gettext contains “hello world” examples in a variety of other programming languages; see the Gettext home page at http://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/.
GNU Hello was written by Mike Haertel, David MacKenzie, Jan Brittenson, Charles Hannum, Roland McGrath, Noah Friedman, Karl Eichwalder, Karl Berry, and The King.
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