# The books/autobook port

## autobook-1.5v0 – documentation for autoconf, automake, libtool

## Description

    Autoconf, Automake and Libtool are packages for making your software
    more portable and to simplify building it--usually on someone else's
    system.  Software portability and effective build systems are crucial
    aspects of modern software engineering practice. It is unlikely
    that a software project would be started today with the expectation
    that the software would run on only one platform. Hardware constraints
    may change the choice of platform, new customers with different
    kinds of systems may emerge or your vendor might introduce incompatible
    changes in newer versions of their operating system. In addition,
    tools that make building software easier and less error prone are
    valuable.

    Autoconf is a tool that helps make your packages more portable by
    performing tests to discover system characteristics before the
    package is compiled.  Your source code can then adapt to these
    differences.

    Automake is a tool for generating Makefiles--descriptions of what
    to build--that conform to a number of standards. Automake substantially
    simplifies the process of describing the organization of a package
    and performs additional functions such as dependency tracking between
    source files.

    Libtool is a command line interface to the compiler and linker that
    makes it easy to portably generate static and shared libraries,
    regardless of the platform it is running on.

    This book is a tutorial for Autoconf, Automake and Libtool, hereafter
    referred to as the GNU Autotools. The GNU manuals that accompany
    each tools adequately document each tool in isolation. Until now,
    there has not been a guide that has described how these tools work
    together.

    Thanks go to New Riders (www.newriders.com) for allowing this
    document to be licensed under the Open Publication License  and
    redistributed freely.

    Copyright (c) 2000 by Gary V. Vaughan, Ben Elliston, Tom Tromey and
    Ian Lance Taylor. This material may be distributed only subject to
    the terms and conditions set forth in the Open Publication License,
    draft v1.0 or later (the latest version is presently available at
    http://www.opencontent.org/openpub/).

WWW: http://sourceware.org/autobook/

Categories:
  books devel

## Library dependencies

## Build dependencies

## Run dependencies