Autotools

Executing configure

As discussed in Configuring Your Package in Configuring Your Package, the GNU Coding Standards indicate that a handwritten configure script should generate another script called config.status, whose job it is to generate files from templates. Unsurprisingly, this is exactly the sort of functionality you'll find in an Autoconf-generated configuration script. This script has two primary tasks:

• Perform requested checks

• Generate and then call config.status

The results of the checks performed by configure are written into con-fig.status in a manner that allows them to be used as replacement text for Autoconf substitution variables in template files (Makefile.in, config.h.in, and so on). When you execute configure, it tells you that ...