On Fri, 9 Feb 2001, nathan sportsman wrote:
>
> The configure scripts that come with some tarballs that you see are not
> universal. Certain variants in build environments (portability issues)
> are not the same for every package. You write a file config.in or
> whatever and feed what you want it to look for into autoconfig which
> then generates the configure script for your package.
config.in is the template for config.h, which is just a
stardard c header file to be filled in later by configure. configure.in
is the template for configure, which is generated by processing m4
macros. You don't tell autoconf what you want to look for. You have to
write all the shell scripts to do what you want along with using the
pre-defined macros. autoconf is then what generates the configure script.
It is not only used for portability issues. It is typically used to
change what gets built and how. For instance, you may want to substitute
slang for ncurses and ask not to build x support for a program. This is
much easier to do when generating a makefile than it is to ask the user to
change the build instructions.
Adam
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