Makefile.am ... what are those?

Question

I've stumbled on a make file "Makefile.am" and I tried to use "make -f Makefile.am" on it to no avail. What am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

It's an automake script/makefile. You can learn everything about automake, autoconf, libtool and such through the called autobook.

Basically, the steps would be to run automake, then autoconf, then configure, then make to build the software you have. These steps are neccessary to build the configure script, that automatically search for needed libraries and such on your system.

The process is not easy, unless your software also includes an already generated "configure" file. If so, the only thing you have to do (mostly) is to just run ./configure, then make, then make install to install the software to a default location. If you want to change configure options, you can also look at ./configure --help.