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Various features of Automake can be controlled by options in the
Makefile.am. Such options are applied on a per-Makefile
basis when listed in a special Makefile variable named
AUTOMAKE_OPTIONS. They are applied globally to all processed
Makefiles when listed in the first argument of
AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE in configure.ac. Currently understood
options are:
dist-bzip2 to dist.
dist-lzma to dist.
dist-shar to dist.
dist-zip to dist.
dist-tarZ to dist.
AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE in
configure.ac, it will be ignored otherwise. It will also be
ignored in sub-packages of nested packages (see Subpackages).
AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE. It will prevent the PACKAGE and
VERSION variables to be AC_DEFINEd.
dist target. This is useful
when a package has its own method for making distributions.
dist-gzip to dist.
foo, it
will override a rule for a target named ‘foo$(EXEEXT)’. This is
necessary when EXEEXT is found to be empty. However, by
default automake will generate an error for this use. The
no-exeext option will disable this error. This is intended for
use only where it is known in advance that the package will not be
ported to Windows, or any other operating system using extensions on
executables.
info and install-info
targets will still be available. This option is disallowed at
gnu strictness and above.
install-man target will still
be available for optional installation. This option is disallowed at
gnu strictness and above.
installcheck rule check that installed scripts and
programs support the --help and --version options.
This also provides a basic check that the program's
run-time dependencies are satisfied after installation.
In a few situations, programs (or scripts) have to be exempted from this
test. For instance, false (from GNU sh-utils) is never
successful, even for --help or --version. You can list
such programs in the variable AM_INSTALLCHECK_STD_OPTIONS_EXEMPT.
Programs (not scripts) listed in this variable should be suffixed by
‘$(EXEEXT)’ for the sake of Win32 or OS/2. For instance, suppose we
build false as a program but true.sh as a script, and that
neither of them support --help or --version:
AUTOMAKE_OPTIONS = std-options
bin_PROGRAMS = false ...
bin_SCRIPTS = true.sh ...
AM_INSTALLCHECK_STD_OPTIONS_EXEMPT = false$(EXEEXT) true.sh
In order to use this option with C sources, you should add
AM_PROG_CC_C_O to configure.ac.
These options must be passed as argument to AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE
(see Macros) because they can require additional configure checks.
Automake will complain if it sees such options in an
AUTOMAKE_OPTIONS variable.
tar-v7 selects the old V7 tar format. This is the historical default. This antiquated format is understood by all tar implementations and supports file names with up to 99 characters. When given longer file names some tar implementations will diagnose the problem while other will generate broken tarballs or use non-portable extensions. Furthermore, the V7 format cannot store empty directories. When using this format, consider using the filename-length-max=99 option to catch file names too long.
tar-ustar selects the ustar format defined by POSIX 1003.1-1988. This format is believed to be old enough to be portable. It fully supports empty directories. It can store file names with up to 256 characters, provided that the file name can be split at directory separator in two parts, first of them being at most 155 bytes long. So, in most cases the maximum file name length will be shorter than 256 characters. However you may run against broken tar implementations that incorrectly handle file names longer than 99 characters (please report them to bug-automake@gnu.org so we can document this accurately).
tar-pax selects the new pax interchange format defined by POSIX 1003.1-2001. It does not limit the length of file names. However, this format is very young and should probably be restricted to packages that target only very modern platforms. There are moves to change the pax format in an upward-compatible way, so this option may refer to a more recent version in the future.
See Controlling the Archive Format, for further discussion about tar formats.
configure knows several ways to construct these formats. It
will not abort if it cannot find a tool up to the task (so that the
package can still be built), but ‘make dist’ will fail.
Unrecognized options are diagnosed by automake.
If you want an option to apply to all the files in the tree, you can use
the AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE macro in configure.ac.
See Macros.