(automake-1.16.info)Basics of Distribution

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14.1 Basics of Distribution
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The ‘dist’ rule in the generated ‘Makefile.in’ can be used to generate a
gzipped ‘tar’ file and other flavors of archive for distribution.  The
file is named based on the ‘PACKAGE’ and ‘VERSION’ variables
automatically defined by either the ‘AC_INIT’ invocation or by a
_deprecated_ two-arguments invocation of the ‘AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE’ macro
(see Note: Public Macros for how these variables get their values,
from either defaults or explicit values – it’s slightly trickier than
one would expect).  More precisely the gzipped ‘tar’ file is named
‘${PACKAGE}-${VERSION}.tar.gz’.  You can use the ‘make’ variable
‘GZIP_ENV’ to control how gzip is run.  The default setting is ‘--best’.

   For the most part, the files to distribute are automatically found by
Automake: all source files are automatically included in a distribution,
as are all ‘Makefile.am’ and ‘Makefile.in’ files.  Automake also has a
built-in list of commonly used files that are automatically included if
they are found in the current directory (either physically, or as the
target of a ‘Makefile.am’ rule); this list is printed by ‘automake
--help’.  Note that some files in this list are actually distributed
only if other certain conditions hold (for example, the ‘config.h.top’
and ‘config.h.bot’ files are automatically distributed only if, e.g.,
‘AC_CONFIG_HEADERS([config.h])’ is used in ‘configure.ac’).  Also, files
that are read by ‘configure’ (i.e. the source files corresponding to the
files specified in various Autoconf macros such as ‘AC_CONFIG_FILES’ and
siblings) are automatically distributed.  Files included in a
‘Makefile.am’ (using ‘include’) or in ‘configure.ac’ (using
‘m4_include’), and helper scripts installed with ‘automake
--add-missing’ are also distributed.

   Still, sometimes there are files that must be distributed, but which
are not covered in the automatic rules.  These files should be listed in
the ‘EXTRA_DIST’ variable.  You can mention files from subdirectories in
‘EXTRA_DIST’.

   You can also mention a directory in ‘EXTRA_DIST’; in this case the
entire directory will be recursively copied into the distribution.
Please note that this will also copy _everything_ in the directory,
including, e.g., Subversion’s ‘.svn’ private directories or CVS/RCS
version control files; thus we recommend against using this feature
as-is.  However, you can use the ‘dist-hook’ feature to ameliorate the
problem; Note: The dist Hook.

   If you define ‘SUBDIRS’, Automake will recursively include the
subdirectories in the distribution.  If ‘SUBDIRS’ is defined
conditionally (Note: Conditionals), Automake will normally include all
directories that could possibly appear in ‘SUBDIRS’ in the distribution.
If you need to specify the set of directories conditionally, you can set
the variable ‘DIST_SUBDIRS’ to the exact list of subdirectories to
include in the distribution (Note: Conditional Subdirectories).