The dist target in the generated `Makefile.in' can be used
to generate a gzip'd tar file for distribution. The tar file is
named based on the `PACKAGE' and `VERSION' variables; more
precisely it is named `package-version.tar.gz'.
For the most part, the files to distribute are automatically found by
Automake: all source files are automatically included in a distribution,
as are all `Makefile.am's and `Makefile.in's. Automake also
has a built-in list of commonly used files which, if present in the
current directory, are automatically included. This list is printed by
`automake --help'. Also, files which are read by configure
(ie, the source files corresponding to the files specified in the
AC_OUTPUT invocation) are automatically distributed.
Still, sometimes there are files which must be distributed, but which
are not covered in the automatic rules. These files should be listed in
the EXTRA_DIST variable. Note that EXTRA_DIST can only
handle files in the current directory; files in other directories will
cause make dist runtime failures.
If you define SUBDIRS, automake will recursively include the
subdirectories in the distribution. If SUBDIRS is defined
conditionally (see section Conditionals), automake will normally include all
directories that could possibly appear in SUBDIRS in the
distribution. If you need to specify the set of directories
conditionally, you can set the variable DIST_SUBDIRS to the exact
list of subdirectories to include in the distribution.
Occasionally it is useful to be able to change the distribution before
it is packaged up. If the dist-hook target exists, it is run
after the distribution directory is filled, but before the actual tar
(or shar) file is created. One way to use this is for distributing
files in subdirectories for which a new `Makefile.am' is overkill:
dist-hook:
mkdir $(distdir)/random
cp -p random/a1 random/a2 $(distdir)/random
Automake also generates a distcheck target which can be help to
ensure that a given distribution will actually work. distcheck
makes a distribution, and then tries to do a VPATH build.
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