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The dist
target in the generated Makefile.in can be used
to generate a gzip’d tar
file for distribution. The tar file is
named based on the PACKAGE and VERSION variables.
For the most part, the files to distribute are automatically found by
Automake: all source files are automatically included in a distribution,
as are all Makefile.ams and Makefile.ins. Automake also
has a built-in list of commonly used files which, if present in the
current directory, are automatically included. This list is printed by
‘automake --help’. Also, files which are read by configure
(ie, the source files corresponding to the files specified in the
AC_OUTPUT
invocation) are automatically distributed.
Still, sometimes there are files which must be distributed, but which
are not covered in the automatic rules. These files should be listed in
the EXTRA_DIST
variable.
Occasionally it is useful to be able to change the distribution before
it is packaged up. If the dist-hook
target exists, it is run
after the distribution directory is filled, but before the actual tar
(or shar) file is created. One way to use this is for distributing file
in subdirectories for which a new Makefile.am is overkill:
dist-hook: mkdir $(distdir)/random cp -p random/a1 random/a2 $(distdir)/random
Automake also generates a distcheck
target which can be help to
ensure that a given distribution will actually work. distcheck
makes a distribution, and then tries to do a VPATH
build.