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2 Creating a Makefile.in

To create all the Makefile.ins for a package, run the automake program in the top level directory, with no arguments. automake will automatically find each appropriate Makefile.am (by scanning configure.in; see Scanning configure.in) and generate the corresponding Makefile.in.

You can optionally give automake an argument; ‘.am’ is appended to the argument and the result is used as the name of the input file. This feature is generally only used to automatically rebuild an out-of-date Makefile.in. Note that automake must always be run from the topmost directory of a project, even if being used to regenerate the Makefile.in in some subdirectory. This is necessary because automake must scan configure.in, and because automake uses the knowledge that a Makefile.in is in a subdirectory to change its behavior in some cases.

automake accepts the following options:

--amdir=dir

Look for Automake data files in directory dir instead of in the installation directory. This is typically used for debugging.

--foreign

An alias for ‘--strictness=foreign’.

--gnits

An alias for ‘--strictness=gnits’.

--gnu

An alias for ‘--strictness=gnu’.

--help

Print a summary of the command line options and exit.

--include-deps

Include all automatically generated dependency information (see Automatic dependency tracking) in the generated Makefile.in. This is generally done when making a distribution; see What Goes in a Distribution.

--add-missing

Automake requires certain common files to exist in certain situations; for instance config.guess is required if configure.in runs AC_CANONICAL_HOST. Automake is distributed with several of these files; this option will cause the missing ones to be automatically added to the package, whenever possible.

--output-dir=dir

Put the generated Makefile.in in the directory dir. Ordinarily each Makefile.in is created in the directory of the corresponding Makefile.am. This option is used when making distributions.

--strictness=level

Set the global strictness to level; this can be overridden in each Makefile.am if required. See General ideas for more information.

--verbose

Cause Automake to print information about which files are being read or created.

--version

Print the version number of Automake and exit.