GNU Autoconf, Automake, and Libtool

If you are a developer and are looking to participate in the Open Source development growth area you will need to learn new Open Source tools. GNU autoconf, GNU automake and GNU libtool are key tools for Open Source application development. These tools are not easy to learn, so some of the leading authorities on these tools have agreed to work together on this book to teach developers how to boost their productivity and the portability of their application. This book place New Riders/MTP at the center of the Open Source development community. Autoconf, Automake and Libtool is an efficient discourse on the use of autoconf, automake and libtool aimed at reducing the steep learning curve normally associated with these tools. This is a study guide to the interactions between the tools, and how best to get them to cooperate. If you are a developer and have no GNU build environment expertise, this book will help you develop these tools completely and confidently.

Ben Elliston works for Cygnus Solutions, one of the leading Open Source software companies. He is the current maintainer of GNU Autoconf. Eleftherios Gkioulekas is a graduate student in the Department of Applied Mathematics in the University of Washington. Elef began writing tutorial documentation for GNU development tools in January 1998 for fun. Ian Lance Taylor has been contributing to free software since 1990. His GNU/Taylor UUCP package was an early beta test for autoconf in 1991. He has contributed many patches to autoconf, including rewriting the support for a separate config.h file. He contributed support for conditionals in automake. He is currently the maintainer of the GNU binutils, which was one of the first widely distributed free software packages to adopt libtool. He worked on free software for many years at Cygnus Solutions, and is a founder of Zembu Labs. Tom Tromey is the current maintainer and a leading authority on automake, authoring much of the online documentation on this tool. Gary Vaughan is one of the current maintainers of libtool. He has contributed patches to autoconf for close to five years, and to automake and libtool since their inceptions. He is currently working on making libtool an Open Source tool for NT developers.