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1 Introduction

Large software packages, especially open-source (OSS) ones, must be highly portable so as to maximize their use on as many systems as possible. Past techniques for ensuring that software can build cleanly and run identically on many systems include the following:

GNU Autoconf [5] solves the above problems by providing canned tests that can dynamically detect various features of the system on which the tests are run. By actually testing a feature before using it, Autoconf and its sister tools Automake [6] and Libtool [7] can build packages portably without user intervention. These automated software configuration tools (autotools [10]) can run on numerous systems. Autotools work identically regardless of the OS version, any local changes that administrators installed on the system, which system software packages were installed or not, and which system patches were installed.



The rest of this paper is organized as follows. Section 2 explains the motivation for automated software configuration tools. In section 3 we explain how GNU Autoconf and associated tools work, explore their limitations, and describe how we used these tools. Section 4 evaluates several large OSS packages and details the use of autotools in the Am-utils package. We conclude in Section 5.


next up previous
Next: 2 Motivation Up: Overhauling Amd for the Previous: Overhauling Amd for the
Erez Zadok 2002-06-10