I just managed around to learn the very basics of autotools, and as a first execrise, used them on my “SSDDiff” xmldiff application. So you can now build it with the usual “./configure && make” command (if you have C++ STL and libxml2, that is, but these have been really standard for years now)

So there is a new tarball on the Alioth project page which should be a lot easier to install. Get it while it’s hot. ;-)

A few words about ssddiff:

SSDDiff is an “diff” application for XML files, which can output into a “merged” format, “xupdate” diffs or “marked” versions of the source files. The algorithm used is very good at dealing with structural changes, but it uses rather much memory and is not the fastest. So it’s a good choice when you have a difficult case (one could say it tries to do a “semantic diff”). If you have CVS files or database tables dumped to XML, use other tools.