The Importance of Reading Autoconf and Automake Manuals

The title of this post is possibly an understatement. However, time and again, silly questions and "stupid"/inappropriate way of using software tools can be prevented. This is especially applies to all GNU-related tools. If you've installed GNU tools such as Autotools, you must read its accompanying manual, preferably via:

$ info autoconf
$ info automake

Take your time to learn how to use keyboard navigation by pressing "?" key to enter the navigation help menu.

You'll appreciate the manuals better after seeing questions like this at Stackoverflow. Let me copy the relevant question here:

I've been looking for this for a while: I'm currently converting a medium-size program to autotools, coming from an eclipse-based method (with makefiles)

I'm always used to having a "debug" build, with all debug symbols and no optimizations, and a "release" build, without debug symbols and best optimizations.

Now I'm trying to replicate this in some way with autotools, so I can (perhaps) do something like:

./configure
make debug

Which would have all debug symbols and no optimizations, and where:

./configure
make

Would result in the "release" version (default)

PS: I've read about the --enable-debug flag/feature, ...

Well, this question is kind of "stupid" if you have read Automake manual. The manual explains the answer to such question in detail in section 2.2.6 Parallel Build Trees (a.k.a VPATH Builds), thorough an example. The title of section 2 of the manual is An Introduction to the Autotools. I think now you know where I'm getting at without going further.  I have to give kudos to William Purcell for his answers in that Stackoverflow thread.

Now, the unfortunate fact that many developers failed to see the value of reading the manual. The prove is everywhere, if you found a package that uses Autotools and provide a "./configure --enable-debug" flag which changes the compiler flags such as the optimization flag, then it's a sign of trouble because the "maintainer" of the code certainly doesn't follow GNU autotools philosophy in creating his package and make other people life harder. FYI, in GNU software terminology, the maintainer is one who create the software package, while user is one who compile and install the package.

Well, that's it for reminder to RTFM.

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