1.2. The First configure Programs

By 1992, four different systems had been developed to help with source-code portability:

  • The metaconfig program, by Larry Wall, Harlan Stenn, and Raphael Manfredi.

  • The Cygnus 'configure' script, by K. Richard Pixley, and the original GCC 'configure' script, by Richard Stallman. These are quite similar, and the developers communicated regularly. GCC is the GNU Compiler Collection (formerly the GNU C compiler).

  • The GNU Autoconf package, by David MacKenzie.

  • Imake, part of the X Window system.

These systems all split building a program into two steps: a configuration step and a build step. For all the systems, the build step used the standard Unix make program. The make program reads a set of rules in a 'Makefile', ...

Get GNU Autoconf, Automake, and Libtool now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.

Start your free trial