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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-gzip

Generate a ‘gzip’ tar archive of the distribution. This is the only format enabled by default.

dist-bzip2

Generate a ‘bzip2’ tar archive of the distribution. bzip2 archives are frequently smaller than gzipped archives. By default, this rule makes ‘bzip2’ use a compression option of -9. To make it use a different one, set the BZIP2 environment variable. For example, ‘make dist-bzip2 BZIP2=-7’.

dist-lzip

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

dist-xz

Generate an ‘xz’ tar archive of the distribution. xz archives are frequently smaller than bzip2-compressed archives. By default, this rule makes ‘xz’ use a compression option of -e. To make it use a different one, set the XZ_OPT environment variable. For example, run this command to use the default compression ratio, but with a progress indicator: ‘make dist-xz XZ_OPT=-ve’.

dist-zip

Generate a ‘zip’ archive of the distribution.

dist-tarZ

Generate a tar archive of the distribution, compressed with the historical (and obsolescent) program compress. This option is deprecated, and it and the corresponding functionality will be removed altogether in Automake 2.0.

dist-shar

Generate a ‘shar’ archive of the distribution. This format archive is obsolescent, and use of this option is deprecated. It and the corresponding functionality will be removed altogether in Automake 2.0.

The rule dist (and its historical synonym dist-all) will create archives in all the enabled formats (see List of Automake options for how to change this list). By default, only the dist-gzip target is hooked to dist.