a note about autoconf and automake

after several hours,I got autoconf and automake to work on my program,known as following(with autoconf-2.61 and automake-1.10):

1.run autoscan in the source directory,and we can get a file named configure.scan

2.modify the configure.scan so that it makes sense to our project,

• first of all is AC_INIT macro,i.e. our project name,version,and contact address;
• then add a macro AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE (be careful of the red M),fill it with the project name and version,if it does not exist,then aclocal will not work properly;
• and do not touch AC_CONFIG_HEADER ,it's for people who want make their project portable with a "config.h",so do not feed your project's header files to it;at last comes AC_OUTPUT,set it with "Makefile";
• other macros are project specified,so we skip them here;
• rename configure.scan to configure.ac or configure.in

3.run aclocal to generate aclocal.m4(if no aclocal.m4 generated,there must be something wrong)

4.run autoconf to generate configure

5.create a file Makefile.am,

• set macro bin_PROGRAMS=names(it's the executable file's name,like emacs,mplayer,etc)
• name_SOURCES=files(it's the sources files whitch the binary relies on)
• name_LDFLAGS=flags(e.g. if we use expat, add -lexpat here)

many other macros can be useful,too,but omitted here.

6.run automake -a,touch files which it complains can not find.

7.all right,run ./configure now, we can get Makefile automatically,wonderful,isn't it?