Analyzing Our New Build System

Now let's look at what we put into those two simple Makefile.am files, beginning with the top-level Makefile.am file (shown in Example 5-2).

Example 5-2. Makefile.am: The top-level Makefile.am file contains only a subdirectory reference.

SUBDIRS = src

This single line of text tells Automake several things about our project:

  • One or more subdirectories contain makefiles to be processed in addition to this file.[71]

  • Directories in this space-delimited list should be processed in the order specified.

  • Directories in this list should be recursively processed for all primary targets.

  • Directories in this list should be treated as part of the project distribution, unless otherwise specified.

As with most Automake constructs, SUBDIRS ...

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