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- Autoconf, Automake and Libtool are packages for making your software
- more portable and to simplify building it--usually on someone else's
- system. Software portability and effective build systems are crucial
- aspects of modern software engineering practice. It is unlikely
- that a software project would be started today with the expectation
- that the software would run on only one platform. Hardware constraints
- may change the choice of platform, new customers with different
- kinds of systems may emerge or your vendor might introduce incompatible
- changes in newer versions of their operating system. In addition,
- tools that make building software easier and less error prone are
- valuable.
- Autoconf is a tool that helps make your packages more portable by
- performing tests to discover system characteristics before the
- package is compiled. Your source code can then adapt to these
- differences.
- Automake is a tool for generating Makefiles--descriptions of what
- to build--that conform to a number of standards. Automake substantially
- simplifies the process of describing the organization of a package
- and performs additional functions such as dependency tracking between
- source files.
- Libtool is a command line interface to the compiler and linker that
- makes it easy to portably generate static and shared libraries,
- regardless of the platform it is running on.
- This book is a tutorial for Autoconf, Automake and Libtool, hereafter
- referred to as the GNU Autotools. The GNU manuals that accompany
- each tools adequately document each tool in isolation. Until now,
- there has not been a guide that has described how these tools work
- together.
- Thanks go to New Riders (www.newriders.com) for allowing this
- document to be licensed under the Open Publication License and
- redistributed freely.
- Copyright (c) 2000 by Gary V. Vaughan, Ben Elliston, Tom Tromey and
- Ian Lance Taylor. This material may be distributed only subject to
- the terms and conditions set forth in the Open Publication License,
- draft v1.0 or later (the latest version is presently available at
- http://www.opencontent.org/openpub/).
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