Autotools
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Autotools is the general name given to the set of build tools common in Unix development today. These tools include GNU autoconf, GNU automake, aclocal, configure, autogen.sh and make.
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[edit] configure
configure scripts (often written as "./configure") are generated by autoconf. They are used to inspect the current development environment and provide the resulting information to other members of the autotools suite. Common tasks addressed by configure.ac files include
- Determining the host architecture (i386, ia64, ppc, etc)
- Detecting presence of common libraries such as glib, libmysql, etc
configure scripts are generated by developers and shipped with source code. GNU autoconf and GNU automake are not needed after configure scripts are generated.
[edit] automake
GNU automake processes Makefile.am files and produces Makefile.in files.
[edit] autoconf
GNU autoconf processes configure.ac files to build configure scripts. It also process *.in files to generate other files. For instance, processing a Makefile.in file results in a Makefile file. Processing myfile.in would result in myfile.
[edit] make
GNU make processes and executes Makefile files to eventually produce executable binary code and libraries that these binaries share.
Makefile syntax is described in detail on the GNU make page
