Re: Writing Installer

[Magnus Bergman <magnus bergman observer net>]

On 31 Mar 2004 05:58:11 -0000
"Amit  Bansal" <amitdk29 rediffmail com> wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> This is slightly off-topic here, but I'm sure ppl here can help me in
> this regard!
> 
> I wish to write an installer to generate and install the binaries from
> my source code distribution. I find these files called "configure.in",
> "Makefile.am" etc in the source code distributions of most
> applications. I'm becoming bald, tearing my hair trying to figure out
> how these files are processed, and by whom. I guess tools like
> automake, autoconf... etc are there to make my life simpler, but...

The short answer: You don't need to care about those files, the are not
needed when installing from source. Everything will (in theory) work
exactly the same even if you delete them. So if you are not a developer,
you should not ever need to know anything about those tools, that is how
simple they make your life. =)

configure.in (aka configure.ac) is used to generate configure with
autoconf. But since this has already been done before distribution of
the source, you don't need configure.in or autoconf unless you want to
change the configure script.

Makefile.am if used to generate Makefile.in with automake. The same goes
here, you generally don't need Makefile.am nor automake.