Dhanaraj M

Autoconf/Automake - Life becomes easy

"Configure/make/make install" is the way to compile and install the packages. However, manually writing the configure and makefile files is not the easy job. This task can be done very easily once the developer knows the basics of automake/autoconf.

configure.in and Makefile.am are the files to be created by the developer. Automake and autoconf should be installed. The main aim of them is to simplify the developer's task and produce the configure and makefile scripts systematically.

./autoconf -> generates configure file from configure.in/configure.ac file
./automake -> generates Makefile.in file from Makefile.am
./configure -> generates Makefile from Makefile.in (This also checks for the necessary packages, compilers, etc and then sets the compilers/flags, install location, include/library locations)

Posted at 08:08AM Jan 08, 2007 by dhanarajm in Sun  |  Comments[0]