Autoconf is a tool for producing shell scripts that automatically configure software source code packages to adapt to many kinds of UNIX-like systems. The configuration scripts produced by Autoconf ar... More

Autoconf is a tool for producing shell scripts that automatically configure software source code packages to adapt to many kinds of UNIX-like systems. The configuration scripts produced by Autoconf are independent of it when they are run. Together with Automake and Libtool, Autoconf forms the GNU build system. Autoconf makes use of GNU m4 to transform a user-written 'configure.ac' (formerly, and on older projects, called 'configure.in') file to a portable shell script called 'configure'. The 'configure' script runs non-interactively, and generates customized headers and makefiles derived from pre-written templates. You could say that Autoconf compiles the M4 program in 'configure.ac' into a shell script. Autoconf was begun in the summer of 1991 by David Mackenzie to support his work at the Free Software Foundation. In the subsequent years it grew to include enhancements from a variety of authors and became the most widely used build configuration system for writing portable free or open source software.   [edit]  Less