Usage
Autotools assists a software development person or team to write cross-platform software and make it available to a much wider user community, including in its source-code form to those users who wish to build the software themselves. Users simply run the supplied configure script, which has no dependencies other than the presence of a Bourne-compatible shell, and then a make program. They do not not need to have the Autotools themselves installed on the computer.
It can be used both for building native programs on the build machine and also for cross-compiling to other architectures.
Cross-compiling software to run on a Windows host from a GNU/Linux or other Unix-like build system is also possible, using MinGW, however native compilation is often desirable on operating systems (such as the Microsoft Windows family of systems) that cannot run Bourne shell scripts on their own. This makes building such software on the Windows operating system a bit harder than on a Unix-like system which provides the Bourne shell as a standard component. One can install the Cygwin or MSYS system on top of Windows to provide a Unix-like compatibility layer, though, allowing configure scripts to run. Cygwin also provides the GNU Compiler Collection, GNU make, and other software that provides a nearly complete Unix-like system within Windows; MSYS also provides GNU make and other tools designed to work with the MinGW version of GCC.
Although the developer is expected to provide a configure script for the end-user, occasionally the user may wish to re-generate the configure script itself. Such working might be necessary if the user wishes to amend the source code itself. Such users would need to have Autotools installed, and to use components such as its autoreconf.
The autoconf-generated configure can be slow because it executes programs like the C compiler many times in order to test whether various libraries, header files, and language features are present. This particularly affects Cygwin, which, due to its lack of a native fork system call, may execute configure scripts considerably slower than Linux.
Read more about this topic: GNU Build System
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