Maintainer Autotools Instructions ********************************* This project uses autotools and does not add/checkin files generated by autoreconf to the repository. These files are to be included only in dist-bundles. There is a clear distinction between building from the repository or building from a dist-bundle. This document is for project maintainers building from the repository. The maintainer is responsible for generating files associated with autotools. These files in turn are distributed with dist-bundles, but never should be added/checked-in to the repository. Whenever any information for which autotools may depend on is changed, then you must issue the following command which will force generation of all files and install support scripts required at configure-time: autoreconf -fiv Where is Makefile.am? And what is this GNUmakefile stuff? We already have a sophisticated project which requires enough GNU-tools at build-time that it makes no sense to hope-and-pray that BSD flavors of make will work. As such, the files are renamed to be those which are only recognized by GNU make. This helps avoid confusion when people run the wrong make flavor -- it's better to see Makefile not found, rather than 100 obscure make incompatibility-errors. So we have GNUmakefile.am which is just like the old Makefile.am only better. Post configure, we end up with GNUmakefile in your build directory. Care has been taken to avoid subdir makefiles. And while they may eventually become part of this project, it's nice to avoid them when when possible.