Description:

What is "it"? The GNU Autotools, a group of utilities developed in
the 1990s for the GNU Project. The authors of this book and I were
some of its principal developers, but it turned out to help solve many
other peoples' problems as well, and many other people contributed to it.
It is one of the many projects that developed by cooperation while making
what is now often called GNU/Linux. The community made the GNU Autotools
widespread, as people adopted it for their own programs and extended it
where they found that was needed. The creation of Libtool is that type
of contribution.

Autoconf, Automake, and Libtool were developed separately, to make
tackling the problem of software configuration more manageable by
partitioning it. But they were designed to be used as a system, and
they make more sense when you have documentation for the whole system.
This book stands a level above the software packages, giving the
expertise of its authors in using this whole system to its fullest.
It was written by people who have lived closest to the problems and
their solutions in software.