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Automake is a tool for automatically generating Makefile.ins from
files called Makefile.am. Each Makefile.am is basically a
series of make macro definitions (with rules being thrown in
occasionally). The generated Makefile.ins are compliant with the
GNU Makefile standards.
The GNU Makefile Standards Document (see Makefile Conventions in The GNU Coding Standards) is long, complicated, and subject to change. The goal of Automake is to remove the burden of Makefile maintenance from the back of the individual GNU maintainer (and put it on the back of the Automake maintainer).
The typical Automake input file is simply a series of macro definitions. Each such file is processed to create a Makefile.in. There should generally be one Makefile.am per directory of a project.
Automake does constrain a project in certain ways; for instance it assumes that the project uses Autoconf (see Introduction in The Autoconf Manual), and enforces certain restrictions on the configure.in contents1.
Automake requires perl in order to generate the
Makefile.ins. However, the distributions created by Automake are
fully GNU standards-compliant, and do not require perl in order
to be built.
Mail suggestions and bug reports for Automake to bug-automake@gnu.org.
Autoconf 2.50 promotes configure.ac over configure.in. The rest of this documentation will refer to configure.in as this use is not yet spread, but Automake supports configure.ac too.