literate programming in ansi-c/c++

cwebbin is an extension of silvio levy's and donald e. knuth's cweb system and donald e. knuth's ctwill program. it requires the contents of the original cweb source drop and the secondary ctwill source drop, to which it applies a set of change files to introduce advanced features. see the extensive readme for the full story.

feature list

• includes ctwill and its utilities;
• internationalization with the “GNU gettext utilities”;
• temporary file output: check output for differences from former run with new option +c;
• [only cweave and ctwill] option -l to change the first line in the tex output; options -i and -o for slightly customizable code layout;
• [only ctangle] output can be redirected to @(/dev/{stdout,stderr,null}@>;
• [only in “tex live”] file lookup with the kpathsea library.

manual compilation

extract ctwill.tar.gz and add the contents of cweb-4.12.2.tar.gz (overwriting outdated source files Makefile, common.h, common.w, and prod.w) and cwebbin-2025.1.tar.gz for the full set of source files. replace @@VERSION@@ in line 129 of the Makefile.unix with something like Version 4.12.2 [CWEBbin 2025.1]. touch *.cxx. unix/linux users should work with make -f Makefile.unix exclusively (targets boot, cautiously, and all). macos/bsd users will have to adapt Makefile.unix in several spots to make things work.

advanced packaging

alternatively, you may want to use rpmbuild or debbuild for compiling the sources and for creating installable packages in rpm and deb format. set up your build arena with mkdir BUILD BUILDROOT RPMS SOURCES SPECS SRPMS for rpmbuild (plus mkdir DEBS SDEBS for debbuild).

clone cweb and cwebbin, create the source drops with

git archive -o cweb-4.12.2.tar.gz cweb-4.12.2
git archive -o cwebbin-2025.1.tar.gz cwebbin-2025.1

respectively, put these two tarballs and the original ctwill.tar.gz in the SOURCES directory, add the patch files

• 0001-Support-extended-syntax-for-numeric-literals.patch
• 0002-Purge-redundant-TeX-macro.patch
• 0003-Adapt-to-CWEB-4.5.patch
• 0004-Add-silent-datecontentspage-macro.patch
• 0005-Update-CTWILL-macros-for-CWEB-4.9.patch

to SOURCES also, and place cwebbin.spec in the SPECS directory of your build arena.

the five patch files upgrade the ctwill macros for modern cweb. originally, they come from branch update-macros-for-cweb-4 and can be recreated by git format-patch master in the archived ctwill project.

depending on your preferences run the magic incantation

{deb|rpm}build -ba SPECS/cwebbin.spec

cweb for texlive

the extended sources and the build system were modified to smoothly integrate with the texlive build system. by invoking

{deb|rpm}build -bi SPECS/cwebbin.spec --with texlive

you receive a small tarball cweb-texlive.tar.gz, which should be extracted in texlive's source directory texlive-source (or the subversion equivalent) with

cd /path/to/texlive-source
pax -rzf /path/to/cweb-texlive.tar.gz

this tarball contains *-w2c.ch files that modify the original cweb sources for the texlive ecosystem. additionally, it contains language catalogs, tex macros, and cweb include files.

updated versions of cweb are added to the texlive source tree with

cd /path/to/texlive-source/texk/web2c/cwebdir
pax -rzf /path/to/cweb-4.12.2.tar.gz