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15 Changing Automake’s Behavior

Various features of Automake can be controlled by options in the Makefile.am. Such options are listed in a special variable named AUTOMAKE_OPTIONS. Currently understood options are:

gnits

gnu

foreign

cygnus

Set the strictness as appropriate. The gnits option also implies readme-alpha and check-news.

ansi2knr

path/ansi2knr

Turn on automatic de-ANSI-fication. See Automatic de-ANSI-fication. If preceeded by a path, the generated Makefile.in will look in the specified directory to find the ansi2knr program. Generally the path should be a relative path to another directory in the same distribution (though Automake currently does not check this).

check-news

Cause make dist to fail unless the current version number appears in the first few lines of the NEWS file.

dejagnu

Cause dejagnu-specific rules to be generated. See Support for test suites.

dist-shar

Generate a dist-shar target as well as the ordinary dist target. This new target will create a shar archive of the distribution.

dist-zip

Generate a dist-zip target as well as the ordinary dist target. This new target will create a zip archive of the distribution.

dist-tarZ

Generate a dist-tarZ target as well as the ordinary dist target. This new target will create a compressed tar archive of the distribution; a traditional tar and compress will be assumed. Warning: if you are actually using GNU tar, then the generated archive might contain nonportable constructs.

no-dependencies

This is similar to using ‘--include-deps’ on the command line, but is useful for those situations where you don’t have the necessary bits to make automatic dependency tracking work See Automatic dependency tracking. In this case the effect is to effectively disable automatic dependency tracking.

no-installinfo

The generated Makefile.in will not cause info pages to be built or installed by default. However, info and install-info targets will still be available. This option is disallowed at ‘GNU’ strictness and above.

no-installman

The generated Makefile.in will not cause man pages to be installed by default. However, an install-man target will still be available for optional installation. This option is disallowed at ‘GNU’ strictness and above.

no-texinfo.tex

Don’t require texinfo.tex, even if there are texinfo files in this directory.

readme-alpha

If this release is an alpha release, and the file README-alpha exists, then it will be added to the distribution. If this option is given, version numbers are expected to follow one of two forms. The first form is ‘MAJOR.MINOR.ALPHA’, where each element is a number; the final period and number should be left off for non-alpha releases. The second form is ‘MAJOR.MINORALPHA’, where ALPHA is a letter; it should be omitted for non-alpha releases.

version

A version number (eg ‘0.30’) can be specified. If Automake is not newer than the version specified, creation of the Makefile.in will be suppressed.

Unrecognized options are diagnosed by automake.