1. Introduction

• The GNU Autotools (Autoconf, Automake and Libtool) are the de-facto standard for portably building C and C++ applications.
• They support all UNIX platforms as well as Microsoft Win32
• As far as the installer is concerned, building the program depends on nothing but a Bourne shell implementation, a C compiler and a standard "make" program.
• The developer requires other tools such as the Autoconf package, Perl, the Automake package and GNU m4.

Philosophy

• Autoconf performs some system-wide tests to check for common system parameters: the location of programs, the existence of functions and system calls, their behaviour, the availability of libraries, etc.
• Using this it builds (on each target system) an appropriate makefile and a header file, which can be used to build the package natively
• This is superior than writing various "#ifdef" for every system out there, or writing a different makefile for every system.