Autoconf, Automake and Libtool, also called the "autotools", are often seen by numerous developers as sorcery or black magic, difficult to use and understand. While some of these feelings have some real roots, this impression of sorcery is also due for a large part to a lack of knowledge about these tools, resulting in more and more hacks, strengthening even further the feeling of black magic.
Through this tutorial, we aim at giving a fresh look at these tools, starting from scratch. Understanding the basic principles, how to write clean and readable configure.ac and Makefile.am logic, and highlight some best (and worst) practices. We'll look at building programs, libraries, adding configuration tests and conditional compilation, and more. Join the tutorial to (re)discover the autotools!
