I just went this very same dance with an old project, smart, which evaluates string matching algorithms. Faster strstr(). From 2013. It was in a better shape th

I just went this very same dance with an old project, smart, which evaluates string matching algorithms. Faster strstr(). From 2013. It was in a better shape than zlib, but still. Their shell build script was called makefile, kid me not. So first create a proper dependency management: GNUmakefile. A BSD makefile would have been prettier, but not many are used to this. dos2unix, chmod -x `find . -name *.c -o name *\.h`, clang-format -i All in seperate commits. Turns out there was a .h file not a header, but some custom list of algorithm states, broken by fmt. Dontg do that. Either keep it a header file, or rename it to .lst or such. Fix all the warnings, hundreds. Check with sanitizers. Check the tests, disable broken algorithms, and mark them as such. Improve the codebase. There are lots of hints of thought about features. write them. Simplify the state handling. Improve the tests. Add make check lint. Check all the linter warnings. Add a CI. Starting with Linux, Windows mingw, macos and aarch64. Turns out the code is Linux x64 only, ha. Make it compat with sse checks, windows quirks. Waiting for GH actions suck, write Dockerfiles and qemu drivers into your makefile. Maybe automake would have been a better idea after all. Or even proper autoconf. Find the missing algorithms described elsewhere. Add them. Check their limitations. Reproducible builds? Not for this one, sorry. This is luxury. Rather check clang-tidy, and add fuzzing. https://github.com/rurban/smart https://github.com/rurban/smart