GNU build system

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The GNU build system, also known as Autotools, is a suite of tools produced by the GNU project that assist in making packages portable to many UNIX-like systems. It is part of the GNU toolchain.

It comprises

Other related tools include

The GNU build system is widely used in many free software and open source packages. While the tools comprising the GNU build system themselves are GPL-ed free software, there are no restrictions in using them in making non-free software portable.

The biggest advantage of GNU build system is that the build tools the software generates are entirely self-contained; software does not need anything else besides normal Unix tools, and libraries related to the software, to build. The tools generate shell script files that are rather portable and only depend on Make, C/C++ compiler, Bourne-compatible shell, and standard Unix tools. The biggest disadvantage is that the generated build code is very complex and often unreadable, though the user is not meant to modify it directly. To get the most out of the three tools, the programmer has to be familiar with all of the three tools and the various different command syntaxes they use.

Sometimes programs distributed in source code form do not contain a configure file. It is then intended that the users should generate it by themselves. It is done like this:

 aclocal
 autoconf
 automake
 ./configure

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