Menu
I'm trying to learn how to use autotools and I can't seem to find a good beginner-friendly answer to this question. What's the difference between autoconf and autoreconf.
881
autoreconf is a Autotool which is used to create automatically buildable source code for Unix-like systems. Autotool is a common name for autoconf, automake, etc. These all together are termed as Autotools.
The dh-autoreconf package supplies dh module/debhelper/cdbs commands to run autoreconf and restore the original source files on clean. These commands are run by default when using the dh sequencer since debhelper compatibility level 10.
dh-autoreconf provides a debhelper sequence addon named 'autoreconf' and two commands, dh_autoreconf and dh_autoreconf_clean. The dh_autoreconf command creates a list of the files and their checksums, calls autoreconf and then creates a second list for the new files.
Autoconf essentially runs the preprocessor on your script to produce a portable shell script which will perform all the requisite tests, produce handy log files, preprocess template files, for example to generate Makefile from Makefile.in and and take a standard set of command line arguments.
autoconf generates the configure script from various input files, some of which are created using other tools like aclocal, automake, etc.
autoreconf is a helper that knows how to call all these tools in the right order
You'll usually just call autoreconf yourself and let it deal with all the lower level tools ....
126
If you love us? You can donate to us via Paypal or buy me a coffee so we can maintain and grow! Thank you!
Donate Us With
