1.1 What this book is
This book is a tutorial for Autoconf, Automake and Libtool, hereafter
referred to as the GNU Autotools. The GNU manuals that accompany each
tools adequately document each tool in isolation. Until now, there has
not been a guide that has described how these tools work
together.
As these tools have evolved over the years, design decisions have been
made by contributors who clearly understand the associated problems, but
little documentation exists that captures why things are the way they
are. By way of example, one might wonder why some Autoconf macros use
shell constructs like:
| if test "x$var" = xbar; then
echo yes 1>&5
fi
|
instead of the simpler:
| if [ $var = bar ]; then
echo yes 1>&5
fi
|
Much of this reasoning is recorded in this book.
|