the book of autotools

1

Autoconf, Automake, Libtool

Edition 1.4.4-unofficial, 22 August 2005

$Id: autobook.m4,v 1.2 2005/01/26 14:01:43 joostvb Exp $

Gary V. Vaughan

Ben Elliston

bje@redhat.com

Tom Tromey

tromey@redhat.com

2 Autoconf, Automake, and Libtool

Permission is granted to copy and distribute modified versions of this manual under the con-

ditions for verbatim copying, provided that the entire resulting derived work is distributed

under the terms of a permission notice identical to this one.

Permission is granted to copy and distribute translations of this manual into another lan-

guage, under the above conditions for modified versions, except that this permission notice

may be stated in a translation approved by the Authors.

Foreword 1

Foreword

Preamble

This book is published on paper by New Riders (ISBN 1-57870-190-2), their webpage on

the book is at http://www.newriders.com/autoconf/. Technical reviewers of the paper

"Gary V. Vaughan spent three years as a Computer Systems Engineering undergraduate

at the University of Warwick and then two years at Coventry Unversity studying Computer

Science. He has been employed as a professional C programmer in several industry sectors

for the past seven years, but most recently as a scientist for the Defence Evaluation and

Research Agency. Over the past 10 years or so, Gary has contributed to several free software

projects, including AutoGen, Cygwin, Enlightenment, and GNU M4. He currently helps

maintain GNU Libtool for the Free Software Foundation.

Ben Elliston works at Red Hat Inc., telecommuting from his home in Canberra, Australia.

He develops instruction set simulators and adapts the GNU development tools to new

microprocessors. He has worked with GNU tools for many years and is a past maintainer of

Ian Lance Taylor is co-founder and CTO of Zembu Labs. Previously, he worked at

Cygnus Solutions, where he designed and wrote features and ports for many free software

programs, including the GNU Compiler Collection and the GNU binutils. He was the

maintainer of the GNU binutils for several years. He is the author of GNU/Taylor UUCP.

He was one of the first contributors to Autoconf, and has also made significant contributions

to Automake and Libtool."

Until 2001-09-05, this package was maintained by Gary V. Vaughan, Tom Tromey, Ian

Lance Taylor and Ben Elliston. It was (and is) available via anonymous CVS:

cvs -d :pserver:anoncvs@sources.redhat.com:/cvs/autobook login

Password is anoncvs

2 Autoconf, Automake, and Libtool

webpage on http://mdcc.cx/autobook/, the package can be downloaded from there. It

also has instructions on how to get informed about changes to the autobook package.

This package is not blessed by the maintainers of the official autobook-1.4.tar.gz. There-

fore, I take responsiblity for all errors you might find in this package. Of course, all credit

should go to Vaughan, Tromey, Taylor and Elliston for their excellent work.

Beware! The Autobook is getting somewhat obsolete, I’m afraid: the text has not

been updated (apart from minor corrections) since 2001-09. Autobook talks likely about

autoconf version 2.13, automake version 1.4 and libtool version 1.3.5 (see Appendix A.2:

Downloading GNU Autotools). As of january 2005, released are autoconf 2.59a, automake

1.9.4 and libtool 1.5.6. Therefore, regard the texinfo docume ntation shipped with these

tools as the authoritive source of information.

though there were a lot of programs distributed as source code back then (over USENET),

there was not a lot of consistency in how to compile and install it. The more complicated

a package was, the more likely it was to have its own unique build procedure that had to

be learned first. And there we re no widely used approaches to portability problems. Each

software author handled them in a different way, if they did at all.

Fast forward to the present. A de facto standard is in widespread use for solving those

problems, and it’s not just free software packages that are using it; some proprietary pro-

grams from the largest computer companies are built using this software. It even does

Windows.

As it evolved in the 1990s it demonstrated the power of some good ideas: sharing

making what is now often called GNU/Linux. The community made the GNU Autotools

widespread, as people adopted it for their own programs and extended it where they found

that was needed. The creation of Libtool is that type of contribution.

Autoconf, Automake, and Libtool were developed separately, to make tackling the prob-

lem of software configuration more manageable by partitioning it. But they were designed

Foreword 3

of its authors in using this whole system to its fullest. It was written by people who have

lived closest to the problems and their solutions in software.

Magic happens under the ho od, where e xperts have tinkered until the GNU Autotools

engine can run on everything from jet fuel to whale oil. But there is a different kind of

magic, in the cooperation and sharing that built a widely used system over the Internet,

for anyone to use and improve. Now, as the authors share their knowledge and experience,

you are part of the community, too. Perhaps its spirit will inspire you to make your own