This page printed from:

panoptic.com/rking/Automake+and+Autoconf

For Our King, Only

Recent Changes / Heat / History /Edit

Automake and Autoconf

This revision is from 2012/04/15 03:07. You can Restore it.

This is a bit of a confusing process, but here it is in one shot:

The top-level script (maybe
```
autogen.sh
```
) starts

```
autoreconf
```
which runs:

```
aclocal
```
to turn
```
configure.ac
```
into
```
aclocal.m4
```
, which is the input for both

```
autoconf
```
, which produces
```
./configure
```
, and
```
autoheader
```
which makes
```
config.h.in
```
, then

```
automake
```
which turns
```
Makefile.am
```
into
```
Makefile.in
```
, and then
5)
```
./configure
```
turns the user's input, results of its tests, and
```
Makefile.in
```
into
```
Makefile
```
plus
```
config.h.in
```
into
```
config.h
```

So the basic pipeline is:

Developer works on
```
Makefile.am
```
and
```
configure.ac
```
(Some automatic steps)
Resulting process uses
```
Makefile
```
and
```
config.h
```