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14.5 The Types of Distributions

Automake generates rules to provide archives of the project for distributions in various formats. Their targets are:

dist-bzip2

Generate a bzip2 tar archive of the distribution. bzip2 archives are frequently smaller than gzipped archives.

dist-gzip

Generate a gzip tar archive of the distribution.

dist-lzma

Generate an ‘lzma’ tar archive of the distribution. lzma archives are frequently smaller than bzip2-compressed archives.

dist-shar

Generate a shar archive of the distribution.

dist-xz

Generate an ‘xz’ tar archive of the distribution. xz archives are frequently smaller than bzip2-compressed archives. The ‘xz’ format will soon (early 2009) displace the ‘lzma’ format.

dist-zip

Generate a zip archive of the distribution.

dist-tarZ

Generate a compressed tar archive of the distribution.

The rule dist (and its historical synonym dist-all) will create archives in all the enabled formats, Changing Automake’s Behavior. By default, only the dist-gzip target is hooked to dist.