July 2010
Intermediate to advanced
360 pages
11h 12m
English
The GNU Autotools framework includes three main packages: Autoconf, Automake, and Libtool. The tools in these packages can generate code that depends on utilities and functionality from the gettext, m4, sed, make, and perl packages, among others.
With respect to the Autotools, it's important to distinguish between a maintainer's system and an end user's system. The design goals of the Autotools specify that an Autotools-generated build system should rely only on tools that are readily available and preinstalled on the end user's machine. For example, the machine a maintainer uses to create distributions requires a Perl interpreter, but a machine on which an end-user builds products from release distribution ...