5.3 Maintaining Input Files

If you edit any of the GNU Autotools input files in your package, it is necessary to regenerate the machine generated files for these changes to take effect. For instance, if you add a new source file to the foonly_SOURCES variable in `Makefile.am'. It is necessary to re-generate the derived file `Makefile.in'. If you are building your package, you need to re-run configure to re-generate the site-specific `Makefile', and then re-run make to compile the new source file and link it into `foonly'.

It is possible to regenerate these files by running the required tools, one at a time. However, as we can see above, it can be difficult to compute the dependencies--does a particular change require aclocal to be run? Does a particular change require autoconf to be run? There are two solutions to this problem.

The first solution is to use the autoreconf command. This tool regenerates all derived files by re-running all of the necessary tools in the correct order. It is somewhat of a brute force solution, but it works very well, particularly if you are not trying to accommodate other maintainers, or regular maintenance that would render this command bothersome.

The alternative is Automake's `maintainer mode'. By invoking the AM_MAINTAINER_MODE macro from `configure.in', automake will activate an `--enable-maintainer-mode' option in `configure'. This is explained at length in 8. Bootstrapping.