Re: Writing Installer

[Russell Shaw <rjshaw netspace net au>]

Amit Bansal 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... 
>  
> Can someone guide me to some comprehensive documentation that guides me 
> about when and how to use each of the tools, like automake, autoconf, 
> libtool etc.? I can check out the man pages of these individual tools, 
> but... 
>  
> Please tell me about some documentation that guides me via a 
> walk-through the entire process of generating these files 
> "configure.in", "Makefile.am" etc, and how to use them. I am familiar 
> with "make", and stuff like where header files and libraries are 
> supposed to go, so we can start off from there. 
>  
> I hope someone will help me here! 
>  
> TIA, 
> Amit 

http://www.gnu.org/manual/manual.html
http://www.gnu.org/software/autoconf/manual/autoconf-2.57/autoconf.html
http://www.gnu.org/software/automake/manual/automake.html

It is not easy to learn yourself. You need to hack at your own
project and experiment with configure.ac to figure out how it
really works. The web has a mixture of documentation on obsolete
versions which doesn't help. Expect to learn over a few weeks/months.