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GNU Automake ¶

This manual is for GNU Automake (version 1.17, 12 July 2024), a program that creates GNU standards-compliant Makefiles from template files.

Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover texts, and with no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of the license is included in the section entitled “GNU Free Documentation License.”

Short Table of Contents

1 Introduction
2 An Introduction to the Autotools
- 2.1 Introducing the GNU Build System
- 2.2 Use Cases for the GNU Build System
- 2.3 How Autotools Help
- 2.4 A Small Hello World
3 General ideas
- 3.1 General Operation
- 3.2 Strictness
- 3.3 The Uniform Naming Scheme
- 3.4 Staying below the command line length limit
- 3.5 How derived variables are named
- 3.6 Variables reserved for the user
- 3.7 Programs automake might require
4 Some example packages
- 4.1 A simple example, start to finish
- 4.2 Building true and false
5 Creating a Makefile.in: Invoking automake
6 Scanning configure.ac, using aclocal
- 6.1 Configuration requirements
- 6.2 Other things Automake recognizes
- 6.3 Auto-generating aclocal.m4: Invoking aclocal
- 6.4 Autoconf macros supplied with Automake
7 Directories
- 7.1 Recursing subdirectories
- 7.2 Conditional Subdirectories
- 7.3 An Alternative Approach to Subdirectories
- 7.4 Nesting Packages
8 Building Programs and Libraries
- 8.1 Building a program
  - 8.1.1 Defining program sources
  - 8.1.2 Linking the program
  - 8.1.3 Conditional compilation of sources
  - 8.1.4 Conditional compilation of programs
- 8.2 Building a library
- 8.3 Building a Shared Library
  - 8.3.1 The Libtool Concept
  - 8.3.2 Building Libtool Libraries
  - 8.3.3 Building Libtool Libraries Conditionally
  - 8.3.4 Libtool Libraries with Conditional Sources
  - 8.3.5 Libtool Convenience Libraries
  - 8.3.6 Libtool Modules
  - 8.3.7 _LIBADD, _LDFLAGS, and _LIBTOOLFLAGS
  - 8.3.8 LTLIBOBJS and LTALLOCA
  - 8.3.9 Common Issues Related to Libtool’s Use
- 8.4 Program and Library Variables
- 8.5 Default _SOURCES
- 8.6 Special handling for LIBOBJS and ALLOCA
- 8.7 Variables used when building a program
- 8.8 Yacc and Lex support
  - 8.8.1 Linking Multiple Yacc Parsers
- 8.9 C++ Support
- 8.10 Objective C Support
- 8.11 Objective C++ Support
- 8.12 Unified Parallel C Support
- 8.13 Assembly Support
- 8.14 Fortran 77 Support
  - 8.14.1 Preprocessing Fortran 77
  - 8.14.2 Compiling Fortran 77 Files
  - 8.14.3 Mixing Fortran 77 With C and C++
    - 8.14.3.1 How the Linker is Chosen
- 8.15 Fortran 9x Support
  - 8.15.1 Compiling Fortran 9x Files
- 8.16 Compiling Java sources using gcj
- 8.17 Vala Support
- 8.18 Support for Other Languages
- 8.19 Automatic dependency tracking
- 8.20 Support for executable extensions
9 Other Derived Objects
- 9.1 Executable Scripts
- 9.2 Header files
- 9.3 Architecture-independent data files
- 9.4 Built Sources
  - 9.4.1 Built Sources Example
10 Other GNU Tools
- 10.1 Emacs Lisp
- 10.2 Gettext
- 10.3 Libtool
- 10.4 Java bytecode compilation (deprecated)
- 10.5 Python
  - 10.5.1 Supported versions
11 Building documentation
- 11.1 Texinfo
- 11.2 Man Pages
12 What Gets Installed
- 12.1 Basics of Installation
- 12.2 The Two Parts of Install
- 12.3 Extending Installation
- 12.4 Staged Installs
- 12.5 Install Rules for the User
13 What Gets Cleaned
14 What Goes in a Distribution
- 14.1 Basics of Distribution
- 14.2 Fine-grained Distribution Control
- 14.3 The dist Hook
- 14.4 Checking the Distribution
- 14.5 The Types of Distributions
15 Support for test suites
- 15.1 Generalities about Testing
- 15.2 Simple Tests
- 15.3 Custom Test Drivers
- 15.4 Using the TAP test protocol
- 15.5 DejaGnu Tests
- 15.6 Install Tests
16 Rebuilding Makefiles
17 Changing Automake’s Behavior
- 17.1 Options generalities
- 17.2 List of Automake options
18 Miscellaneous Rules
- 18.1 Interfacing to etags
- 18.2 Handling new file extensions
19 Include
20 Conditionals
- 20.1 Usage of Conditionals
- 20.2 Limits of Conditionals
21 Silencing make
- 21.1 Make is verbose by default
- 21.2 Standard and generic ways to silence Make
- 21.3 How Automake can help in silencing Make
- 21.4 Unsilencing Automake
22 When Automake Isn’t Enough
- 22.1 Extending Automake Rules
- 22.2 Third-Party Makefiles
23 Distributing Makefile.ins
24 Automake API Versioning
25 Upgrading a Package to a Newer Automake Version
26 Frequently Asked Questions about Automake
- 26.1 Version control and generated files
- 26.2 missing and AM_MAINTAINER_MODE
- 26.3 Why doesn’t Automake support wildcards?
- 26.4 Limitations on File Names
- 26.5 Flag Variables Ordering
- 26.6 Why are object files sometimes renamed?
- 26.7 Per-Object Flags Emulation
- 26.8 Handling Tools that Produce Many Outputs
- 26.9 Installing to Hard-Coded Locations
- 26.10 Debugging Make Rules
- 26.11 Reporting Bugs
Appendix A Copying This Manual
- A.1 GNU Free Documentation License
Appendix B Indices
- B.1 Macro Index
- B.2 Variable Index
- B.3 General Index