Automake, Autocnfig and Libtool

The general relationship among the automake, autoconf, and configure script is shown as

• autoscan : Scan the source directory and generate configure.scan, which is the preliminary configure.in file. Then you need to mv and edit this file to be the real confugure.ac file; Basically this step is not mandatory.

• edit the configure.ac to make sure of the below macro are there: AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE()
  AC_PROG_CPP
  AC_PROG_RANLIB
  AC_PROG_LIBTOOL (NOTE: this is needed only if you are going to generate the library)
  

• cp /usr/share/libtool/libtool.m4 ./acinclude.m4
  or
  cp /usr/share/aclocal/libtool.m4 ./acinclude.m4
  This command copy the necessary macros for the libtool to the current acinlucde.m4, which is needed by the aclocal.m4; It is useful only when you are working on the library, and this will ensure when your package ships, there will be no mismatch error between the M4 macros you provided in the version of libtool you built the distribution with, versus the version of the libtool installation in the target host.

• aclocal
  it generate the aclocal.m4 by scanning configure.ac

• libtoolize
  

  Next, you should run libtoolize, which adds some files to your distribution that are required by the macros from `libtool.m4'. In particular, you will get `ltconfig'(20) and `ltmain.sh' which are used to create a custom libtool script on the installer's machine. Sometimes you don't need to run libtoolize manually, since automake will run it for you when it sees the changes you have made to `configure.in',

• autoconf
  generate the configure script from the configure.ac
• autoheader
  I am not sure why it is needed; but if not, the configuration will complian the missing of config.h.in, which is generated by the autoheader
• automake -add-missing
  It will generate the Makefile.in, which is needed by the running of the script file configuration, from the Makefile.am

   237  3:51    autoscan
   238  3:51    mv configure.scan configure.ac
   240  3:52    emacs configure.ac    

  
   245  3:54    libtoolize
   246  3:54    aclocal
   243  3:54    cat /usr/share/aclocal/libtool.m4 >> aclocal.m4  
   247  3:54    autoconf
   251  3:55    autoheader --force
   248  3:54    automake -a



   252  3:55    ./configure --prefix=/local/new_world/foo
   253  3:55    make
   254  3:55    make install

for the Makefile.am for the library building, seems

libmsl_la_HEADERS = $(POST_PROCESSED_FILES) $(HDRS) $(HDRS2)
libmsl_ladir =  $(includedir)/msl

has to be used as above , otherwise (only use one of them) will lead to either distribution doesn't include the headers, or automake complains for invalide variable of the libxxx_la_HEADERS