Hi Robert, The Autotools were created to meet a specific need - that of the open source distribution model supported by many open source projects where, occasionally - or perhaps nightly, the project maintainers would release a source tarball containing a configure script and Makefile.in files. As a regular user, you'd want to just download a tarball, extract, and run ./configure && make.
However, as a potential contributor, you'd want the source repository so you could create patches against the tip of a particular branch. So you'd clone the source repository and use the Autotools to create a configure script for yourself in your repository work area. Thus, the usual technique is to commit the Autotools source files required by your project, but to NOT commit a configure script. Anyone wanting to clone your repository is expected to be "developer enough" to know how to run "autoreconf -i" to create the configure script. While you CAN commit a configure script, it generally causes more problems than it solves, as you find yourself committing an updated configure script for lots of little project changes. Regardless, many projects do this - especially lately on projects hosted by github, mainly (I believe) because github has defined a new trend in the open source world where "regular users" tend to get the source from the repository rather than from a tarball, more often than not these days. Here's a resource you might find helpful: http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/books/autotools_a_guide_to_autoconf_automake_libtool John On Mon, Sep 28, 2015 at 4:20 AM, Robert Parker <rlp1...@gmail.com> wrote: > I need to meet the requirements of 2 sets of users, the ordinary user who > is only interested `./configure; make; make install` and the power users > who want to start with `autoreconf`. > > So far google search on the topic has only increased my confusion. > > -- > The Bundys, Cliven, Ted and Al. Great guys to look up to. >