5. A Minimal GNU Autotools Project

This chapter describes how to manage a minimal project using the GNU Autotools. A minimal project is defined to be the smallest possible project that can still illustrate a sufficient number of principles in using the tools. By studying a smaller project, it becomes easier to understand the more complex interactions between these tools when larger projects require advanced features.

The example project used throughout this chapter is a fictitious command interpreter called foonly. foonly is written in C, but like many interpreters, uses a lexical analyzer and a parser expressed using the lex and yacc tools. The package will be developed to adhere to the GNU `Makefile' standard, which is the default behavior for Automake.

There are many features of the GNU Autotools that this small project will not utilize. The most noteworthy one is libraries; this package does not produce any libraries of its own, so Libtool will not feature in this chapter. The more complex projects presented in 9. A Small GNU Autotools Project and 12. A Large GNU Autotools Project will illustrate how Libtool participates in the build system. The purpose of this chapter will be to provide a high-level overview of the user-written files and how they interact.