The GNU build system, or autotools, is a set of tools whose aim is to create a Makefile for your software in a variety of systems. It's made up of three main tools:
- Autoconf: This parses the contents of a configure.ac file that describes the source code to be built and creates a configure script. This script will then be used to generate the final Makefile.
- Automake: This parses the contents of a Makefile.am file and converts it into a Makefile.in file. This is then used by the configure script generated earlier to obtain a config.status script that gets automatically executed to obtain the final Makefile.
- Libtools: This manages the creation of both static and dynamic libraries.
Before looking into autotools-based recipes, ...