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5.1 Configuration requirements

The one real requirement of Automake is that your configure.ac call AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE. This macro does several things that are required for proper Automake operation (see Autoconf macros supplied with Automake).

Here are the other macros that Automake requires but which are not run by AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE:

AC_CONFIG_FILES
AC_OUTPUT

Automake uses these to determine which files to create (see Creating Output Files in The Autoconf Manual). A listed file is considered to be an Automake generated Makefile if there exists a file with the same name and the .am extension appended. Typically, ‘AC_CONFIG_FILES([foo/Makefile])’ will cause Automake to generate foo/Makefile.in if foo/Makefile.am exists.

When using AC_CONFIG_FILES with multiple input files, as in

AC_CONFIG_FILES([Makefile:top.in:Makefile.in:bot.in])

automake will generate the first .in input file for which a .am file exists. If no such file exists the output file is not considered to be Automake generated.

Files created by AC_CONFIG_FILES are removed by make distclean.