12.1. Introduction to Distributions
The basic approach to creating a tar[1] distribution is to run the following:
[1] "tar" is a Unix archiving program and also the name of the format of the files it manipulates. It is akin to zip.
make make dist
The generated tar file is named package-version.tar.gz, and unpacks into a directory named package-version. These two rules are mandated by the GNU coding standards, and are just good ideas in any case, because it is convenient for the end user to have the version information easily accessible while building a package. It removes any doubt when she goes back to an old tree after some time away from it. Unpacking into a fresh directory is always a good idea—in the old days, some packages would unpack ...
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