Re: gnu autotools
> Can someone explain the relationship between aclocal, libtoolize,
> automake, autoscan, autoheader, and autoconf, and the order I should be
> learning/using them in?
aclocal will generate aclocal.m4 from configure.ac
libtoolize will generate ltmain.sh from configure.ac
automake will generate Makefile.in from Makefile.am
autoscan will examine your source tree and try to generate configure.ac
autoheader will create config.h.in from configure.ac
autoconf will create configure from configure.ac
If you are going to be constructing a build system that uses autoconf
and automake (and optionally libtool), the important things to learn are
1) how to write configure.ac
2) how to write Makefile.am
Once you have those two files, you can run « autoreconf -fiv », and it
will show you that it is running the appropriate autotools in the correct
order. Additional autotools will be run by your Makefile after you run
./configure and make.
There are example configure.ac and Makefile.am snippets and explanations
in the Info documentation of the automake1.9 and autoconf-doc packages.
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