GNU Autotools I - Introduction
Spanish version / Versión en Español First thing first: what are GNU Autotools , and what are they used for? The moniker "GNU Autotools" refers to a collection of software packages: Autoconf , Automake and Libtool . These packages include programs aimed at standardizing and automating the build, test, release and installation processes across multiple platforms. In that sense, it shares a lot of goals and purpose with other tools such as CMake . Most of the GNU software is built using Autotools; git is a famous example. More specifically, what the Autotools do is generate configure scripts and Makefiles from certain configuration files. When generating these files, portability across different platforms is considered in order to allow the package to be built in as many different environments as possible. A user's perspective In this context, we will consider a user a person who downloaded a source tarball for some package, and wants to build it and inst...