Path: csiph.com!usenet.pasdenom.info!gegeweb.org!feeder.news.tin.it!spool.news.tin.it!not-for-mail Newsgroups: comp.programming Date: Tue, 12 Feb 2013 12:25:35 +0100 From: Alessandro Pellegrini X-X-Sender: pellegrini@localhost Subject: Re: configure In-Reply-To: <4389fcd5-6ea0-40d2-8748-dd217a8a6ff2@googlegroups.com> Message-ID: References: <4389fcd5-6ea0-40d2-8748-dd217a8a6ff2@googlegroups.com> User-Agent: Alpine 2.00 (BSF 1167 2008-08-23) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII; format=flowed Lines: 29 Organization: TIN.IT (http://www.tin.it) X-Comments: Please send technical notifications to newsmaster@tin.it NNTP-Posting-Host: 79.3.222.220 X-Trace: 1360668343 reader2.news.tin.it 26774 79.3.222.220:12230 X-Complaints-To: Please send abuse reports to abuse@retail.telecomitalia.it Xref: csiph.com comp.programming:3007 On Tue, 18 Dec 2012, bob wrote: > Is there some kind of automated utility that generates these things? As someone else said, these scripts are automatically generated from 'autotools' [1]. The configure / make / make install set of command is an attempt to generalize the way of distributing software on *nix boxes. The bulky script basically tries to 'discover' whats on your machine and produce makefiles which are going to successfully build the executable(s) on the current architecture, starting from the same source code. With autotools, you specify some rules (in a file usually called configure.ac) which describe what is going to be needed for creating the executable, and then the configure script is created automatically, tryingto abstract what you requested for every architecture/distro you are going to build the executable on. This in a very short and simplyfied way. Bye, Alessandro [1] http://www.gnu.org/savannah-checkouts/gnu/automake/manual/html_node/Autotools-Introduction.html