This is AutoMake, an experimental Makefile generator. It was inspired
by the 4.4BSD make and include files, but aims to be portable and to
conform to the GNU standards for Makefile variables and targets.
automake is a shell script. The input files are called Makefile.am.
The output files are called Makefile.in; they are intended for use
with Autoconf.
Variable assignment lines in Makefile.am pull in defaults from various
little *.am files.
To use AutoMake, replace your Makefile.in files with Makefile.am
files. Since there's no documentation, look at the automake script
and the examples provided for GNU m4 1.3 and fileutils 3.9 (along with
patches you need to apply to those packages) and time 1.6 and find (an
unreleased version).
AutoMake is just a prototype at this point -- expect omissions and bugs.
It uses only the programs that the GNU coding standards allow in
configure scripts, because I wrote it keeping in mind the possibility
of it becoming an Autoconf macro, so it would run at configure-time.
That would slow configuration down a bit, but allow users to modify
the Makefile.am without needing to fetch the AutoMake package. And,
the Makefile.in files wouldn't need to be distributed. But all of
AutoMake would. So I might reimplement AutoMake in Perl, m4, or some
other more appropriate language.
- David MacKenzie <djm@gnu.ai.mit.edu>
