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23 The effect of --cygnus

The features described in this section are deprecated; you must not use any of them in new code, and should remove their use from older but still maintained code: they will be withdrawn the next major Automake release (1.13).

Some packages, notably GNU GCC and GNU gdb, used to have a build environment originally written at Cygnus Support (subsequently renamed Cygnus Solutions, and then later purchased by Red Hat). Packages with this ancestry are sometimes referred to as “Cygnus” trees.

A Cygnus tree has slightly different rules for how a Makefile.in is to be constructed. Passing --cygnus to automake will cause any generated Makefile.in to comply with Cygnus rules.

Here are the precise effects of --cygnus:

• The foreign strictness is implied.
• The options no-installinfo, no-dependencies and no-dist are implied (see Changing Automake’s Behavior).
• The macro AM_MAINTAINER_MODE is required.
• Info files are always created in the build directory, and not in the source directory. Packages that don’t use the cygnus option can emulate this effect by using the no-installinfo option and listing the generated info files in the CLEANFILES variable.
• texinfo.tex is not required if a Texinfo source file is specified. The assumption is that the file will be supplied, but in a place that Automake cannot find – it is an artifact of how Cygnus packages are typically bundled. This effect can be emulated in packages not using the cygnus option with a proper definition of the TEXINFO_TEX variable (see Texinfo).
• Certain tools will be searched for in the build tree as well as in the user’s PATH. These tools are runtest, expect, makeinfo and texi2dvi.
• The check target doesn’t depend on all.