Introduction

Autoconf, Automake, and Libtool are packages for making your software more portable and to simplify building it—usually on someone else's system. Software portability and effective build systems are crucial aspects of modern software engineering practice. It is unlikely that a software project would be started today with the expectation that the software would run on only one platform. Hardware constraints may change the choice of platform, new customers with different kinds of systems may emerge, or your vendor might introduce incompatible changes in newer versions of their operating system. In addition, tools that make building software easier and less error-prone are valuable.

Autoconf is a tool that makes your packages more portable ...

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