A.3 Installing the tools

When installing GNU Autotools, it is a good idea to install the tools in the same location (eg. `/usr/local'). This allows the tools to discover each others' presence at installation time. The location shown in the examples below will be the default, `/usr/local', as this choice will make the tools available to all users on the system.

Installing Autoconf is usually a quick and simple exercise, since Autoconf itself uses `configure' to prepare itself for building and installation. Automake and Libtool can be installed using the same steps as for Autoconf. As a matter of personal preference, I like to create a separate build tree when configuring packages to keep the source tree free of derived files such as object files. Applying what we know about invoking `configure' (see section 3. How to run configure and make), we can now configure and build Autoconf. The only `configure' option we're likely to want to use is `--prefix', so if you want to install the tools in another location, include this option on the command line. It might be desirable to install the package elsewhere when operating in networked environments.

$ mkdir ac-build && cd ac-build $ ~/autoconf-2.13/configure

You will see `configure' running its tests and producing a `Makefile' in the build directory:

creating cache ./config.cache checking for gm4... no checking for gnum4... no checking for m4... /usr/bin/m4 checking whether we are using GNU m4... yes checking for mawk... no checking for gawk... gawk checking for perl... /usr/bin/perl checking for a BSD compatible install... /usr/bin/install -c updating cache ./config.cache creating ./config.status creating Makefile creating testsuite/Makefile

To build Autoconf, type the following:

$ make all

Autoconf has no architecture-specific files to be compiled, so this process finishes quickly. To install files into `/usr/local', it may be necessary to become the root user before installing.

# make install

Autoconf is now installed on your system.