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19 The effect of --cygnus

Cygnus Solutions has slightly different rules for how a Makefile.in is to be constructed. Passing ‘--cygnus’ to automake will cause any generated Makefile.in to comply with Cygnus rules.

Here are the precise effects of ‘--cygnus’:

• Info files are always created in the build directory, and not in the source directory.
• texinfo.tex is not required if a Texinfo source file is specified. The assumption is that the file will be supplied, but in a place that automake cannot find. This assumption is an artifact of how Cygnus packages are typically bundled.
• ‘make dist’ will look for files in the build directory as well as the source directory. This is required to support putting info files into the build directory.
• Certain tools will be searched for in the build tree as well as in the user’s ‘PATH’. These tools are runtest, expect, makeinfo and texi2dvi.
• --foreign is implied.
• The options ‘no-installinfo’ and ‘no-dependencies’ are implied.
• The macros ‘AM_MAINTAINER_MODE’ and ‘AM_CYGWIN32’ are required.

GNU maintainers are advised to use ‘gnu’ strictness in preference to the special Cygnus mode.