Autotools

A set of utilities that are used to enhance project management, portability and ease of use of GNU projects (and others).

The set consists of three programs:

• autoconf, a program to generate "configure" scripts that figure out system configuration
• automake, a program to generate makefiles with specified targets (including standard targets).
• libtool, a program that builds shared libraries for many different *NiX platforms.

See also: The Goat Book