 | |
| Developer(s) | GNU Project |
|---|---|
| Initial release | May 28, 1996; 28 years ago (1996-05-28) |
| Stable release | |
| Repository | |
| Operating system | Cross-platform |
| Type | Programming tool |
| License | GNU General Public License |
| Website | www |
GNU Automake is asoftware development tool to automate parts of the compilation process. It eases common compilation problems. For example, it points to needed dependencies.
It automatically generates one or moreMakefile.in from files calledMakefile.am. EachMakefile.am contains, among other things, useful variable definitions for the compiled software, such ascompiler andlinker flags, dependencies and their versions, etc. The generated "Makefile.in"s are portable and compliant with the Makefile conventions in theGNU Coding Standards, and may be used byconfigure scripts to generate a workingMakefile.[2]
TheFree Software Foundation maintainsautomake as one of theGNU programs, and as part of theGNU build system. It is used to build several GNU applications and libraries, such asGTK,[3] as well as non-GNU software such asXCircuit.[4]
Automake aims to allow the programmer to write a makefile in a higher-level language, rather than having to write the whole makefile manually. In simple cases, it suffices to give:
Automake also takes care of automatically generating thedependency information,[5] so that when a source file is modified, the next invocation of the make command will know which source files need to be recompiled. If the compiler allows it, Automake tries to make the dependency system dynamic: whenever a source file is compiled, that file's dependencies are updated by asking the compiler to regenerate the file's dependency list. In other words, dependency tracking is a side effect of the compilation process.
This attempts to avoid the problem with some static dependency systems, where the dependencies are detected only once when the programmer starts working on the project.[6]
Automake is written inPerl and must be used withGNU Autoconf.[2] Automake contains the following commands:
aclocal, however, is a general-purpose program that can be useful to autoconf users. TheGNU Compiler Collection (GCC), for example, usesaclocal even though its makefile is hand written.
Like Autoconf, Automake is not entirelybackward compatible. For example, a project created with automake 1.13 will not necessarily work with automake 1.14.[7]
