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2.6 Programs automake might require

Automake sometimes requires helper programs so that the generated Makefile can do its work properly. There are a fairly large number of them, and we list them here.

ansi2knr.c

ansi2knr.1

These two files are used by the automatic de-ANSI-fication support (see Automatic de-ANSI-fication).

compile

This is a wrapper for compilers which don’t accept both ‘-c’ and ‘-o’ at the same time. It is only used when absolutely required. Such compilers are rare.

config.guess

config.sub

These programs compute the canonical triplets for the given build, host, or target architecture. These programs are updated regularly to support new architectures and fix probes broken by changes in new kernel versions. You are encouraged to fetch the latest versions of these files from ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/config/ before making a release.

depcomp

This program understands how to run a compiler so that it will generate not only the desired output but also dependency information which is then used by the automatic dependency tracking feature.

elisp-comp

This program is used to byte-compile Emacs Lisp code.

install-sh

This is a replacement for the install program which works on platforms where install is unavailable or unusable.

mdate-sh

This script is used to generate a version.texi file. It examines a file and prints some date information about it.

missing

This wraps a number of programs which are typically only required by maintainers. If the program in question doesn’t exist, missing prints an informative warning and attempts to fix things so that the build can continue.

mkinstalldirs

This script used to be a wrapper around mkdir -p, which is not portable. Now we use prefer to use install-sh -d when configure finds that mkdir -p does not work, this makes one less script to distribute.

For backward compatibility mkinstalldirs is still used and distributed when automake finds it in a package. But it is no longer installed automatically, and it should be safe to remove it.

py-compile

This is used to byte-compile Python scripts.

texinfo.tex

Not a program, this file is required for make dvi, make ps and make pdf to work when Texinfo sources are in the package.

ylwrap

This program wraps lex and yacc and ensures that, for instance, multiple yacc instances can be invoked in a single directory in parallel.