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As a developer it is often painful to continually update the
Makefile.in whenever the include-file dependencies change in a
project. automake supplies a way to automatically track
dependency changes, and distribute the dependencies in the generated
Makefile.in.
Currently this support requires the use of GNU make and
gcc. It might become possible in the future to supply a
different dependency generating program, if there is enough demand.
This mode is enabled by default if any C program or library is defined in the current directory.
When you decide to make a distribution, the dist target will
re-run automake with the ‘--include-deps’ option. This
causes the previously generated dependencies to be inserted into the
generated Makefile.in, and thus into the distribution.
‘--include-deps’ also turns off inclusion of the dependency
generation code.
This mode can be suppressed by putting no-dependencies in the
variable AUTOMAKE_OPTIONS.