Autotools

MSYS2 ships with multiple versions of autotools related tools such as autoconf and automake. To make things easier for developers we provide meta packages which depend on all the usual packages needed to re-configure an autotools based project:

pacman-S"${MINGW_PACKAGE_PREFIX}-autotools"# for mingwpacman-Sautotools# for msys

Since some projects depend on specific versions of automake and, in some cases, autoconf, we provide two wrappers which dynamically provide different versions using the same script:

automake wrapper

By default theautomake wrapper will detect the version to use based on existing generated files and things will just work. If there are no generated files, or if the detected version isn't available it will fall back to the newest available version. You can also force a different version via theWANT_AUTOMAKE env var, and the newest available version viaWANT_AUTOMAKE=latest.

WANT_AUTOMAKE='1.15'autoreconf-fvi

autoconf wrapper

By default theautoconf wrapper will detect the version to use based on existing generated files and things will just work. If there are no generated files, or if the detected version isn't available it will fall back to the newest available version. You can also force a different version via theWANT_AUTOCONF env var, and the newest available version viaWANT_AUTOCONF=latest.

WANT_AUTOCONF='2.69'autoreconf-fvi

These wrappers are developed byGentoo Linux and are also used in Cygwin.

Known Issues

Some projects require their configure scripts to be updated to make them build successfully:

$pacman-S"${MINGW_PACKAGE_PREFIX}-autotools"$autoreconf-fvi$./configure$make...

This is due to some MSYS2 specific patches that have not been upstreamed yet or have not made it into upstream projects.