autoconf and automake

1 Motivation

Understand the workflow of autoconf and automake

2 Workflow

2.1 Simplified Workflow

Our target is to generate one or several Makefile, two steps involved:

• you need to supply one configure.in (or configure.ac) file which will include target Makefile paths list to generate a configure script, commonly, each target Makefile corresponds to one Makefile.am file.
• Then you could use ./configure command to generate the Makefile included in configure.in from corresponding Makefile.am.

The following figure visualize this process:

2.2 Full Workflow

Normally:

• you modify an auto-generated configure.scan to get configure.{in/ac}.
• to generate configure script, you need to generate aclocal.m4 first.

The follw figure shows the full workflow: