Origins Coan originated as a rewrite of a version of Unifdef that I sporadically developed for the internal use of my then employer, Symbian Software Ltd., during 2003 and 2004. That version of Unifdef was derived from Tony Finch's 2003 version for Free BSD. To answer Symbian's requirements, my version of Unifdef became fundamentally more powerful than Tony Finch's and did not retain backward compatitibility with his. The code also sprawled disgracefully. I undertook a rewrite on my own account in mid-2005, with a view to making it a respectable open source contribution. I decided at that point too to adopt a new name for the tool, feeling it had best be differentiated from the family of Unifdef variants aleady in circulation. I called it "Sunifdef" (Son of Unifdef). I developed Sunifdef through 13 releases between February 2006 and January 2008. By mid-2007 I recognised the larger functional "envelope" - for a configuration analyser - that I wanted the tool to grow into and began to develop it as Sunifdef v4.0 in parallel with the last three releases of Sunifdef 3.x. I planned to change the tool's name again to brand its new focus but carry over the v4.0 release number to convey its maturity. I settled on the name "Coan" late in 2007. Mike Kinghan People
Tools The building, testing and documentation of Coan employs open source development tools:
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