使用autoconf生成Makefile.in文件

来源：http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2531827/what-are-makefile-am-and-makefile-in

Makefile.am is a programmer-defined file and is used by automake to generate the Makefile.in file (the .am stands for automake). The configure script typically seen in source tarballs will use the Makefile.in to generate a Makefile.

The configure script itself is generated from a programmer-defined file named either configure.ac or configure.in (deprecated). I prefer .ac (for autoconf) since it differentiates it from the generated Makefile.in files and that way I can have rules such as make dist-clean which runs rm -f *.in. Since it is a generated file, it is not typically stored in a revision system such as Git, SVN, Mercurial or CVS, rather the .ac file would be.

Read more on GNU Autotools. Read about make and Makefile first, then learn about automake, autoconf, libtool, etc.

Simple example

Shamelessly adapted from: http://www.gnu.org/software/automake/manual/html_node/Creating-amhello.html and tested on Ubuntu 14.04 Automake 1.14.1.

Makefile.am

SUBDIRS = src

dist_doc_DATA = README.md

README.md

Some doc.

configure.ac

AC_INIT([automake_hello_world], [1.0], [bug-automake@gnu.org])

AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE([-Wall -Werror foreign])

AC_PROG_CC

AC_CONFIG_HEADERS([config.h])

AC_CONFIG_FILES([

 Makefile

 src/Makefile

])

AC_OUTPUT

src/Makefile.am

bin_PROGRAMS = autotools_hello_world

autotools_hello_world_SOURCES = main.c

src/main.c

#include <config.h>

#include <stdio.h>

int main (void) {

  puts ("Hello world from " PACKAGE_STRING);

  return 0;

}

Usage

autoreconf --install

mkdir build

cd build

../configure

make

sudo make install

autoconf_hello_world

sudo make uninstall

This outputs:

Hello world from automake_hello_world 1.0

Notes

autoreconf --install generates several template files which should be tracked by Git, including Makefile.in. It only needs to be run the first time.

make install installs:

the binary to /usr/local/bin

README.md to /usr/local/share/doc/automake_hello_world