The dist rule in the generated Makefile.in can be used
to generate a gzipped tar file and other flavors of archive for
distribution. The file is named based on the PACKAGE and
VERSION variables automatically defined by either the
AC_INIT invocation or by a deprecated two-arguments
invocation of the AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE macro (see Public Macros
for how these variables get their values, from either defaults or explicit
values – it’s slightly trickier than one would expect).
More precisely the gzipped tar file is named
‘${PACKAGE}-${VERSION}.tar.gz’.
You can use the make variable GZIP_ENV to control how gzip
is run. The default setting is --best.
For the most part, the files to distribute are automatically found by
Automake: all source files are automatically included in a distribution,
as are all Makefile.am and Makefile.in files. Automake also
has a built-in list of commonly used files that are automatically
included if they are found in the current directory (either physically,
or as the target of a Makefile.am rule); this list is printed by
‘automake --help’. Note that some files in this list are actually
distributed only if other certain conditions hold (for example,
the config.h.top and config.h.bot files are automatically
distributed only if, e.g., ‘AC_CONFIG_HEADERS([config.h])’ is used
in configure.ac). Also, files that are read by configure
(i.e. the source files corresponding to the files specified in various
Autoconf macros such as AC_CONFIG_FILES and siblings) are
automatically distributed. Files included in a Makefile.am (using
include) or in configure.ac (using m4_include), and
helper scripts installed with ‘automake --add-missing’ are also
distributed.
Still, sometimes there are files that must be distributed, but which
are not covered in the automatic rules. These files should be listed in
the EXTRA_DIST variable. You can mention files from
subdirectories in EXTRA_DIST.
You can also mention a directory in EXTRA_DIST; in this case the
entire directory will be recursively copied into the distribution.
Please note that this will also copy everything in the directory,
including, e.g., Subversion’s .svn private directories or CVS/RCS
version control files; thus we recommend against using this feature
as-is. However, you can use the dist-hook feature to
ameliorate the problem; see The dist Hook.
If you define SUBDIRS, Automake will recursively include the
subdirectories in the distribution. If SUBDIRS is defined
conditionally (see Conditionals), Automake will normally include
all directories that could possibly appear in SUBDIRS in the
distribution. If you need to specify the set of directories
conditionally, you can set the variable DIST_SUBDIRS to the
exact list of subdirectories to include in the distribution
(see Conditional Subdirectories).