Knowing What To Build

  • What files need to be built?

  • What does each file depend upon to be built?

  • What are the "types" of these files? This affects installation procedures.

  • Are there any tests that can be run?

Determining which files to build, how to install and test them and what their dependencies are is the domain of automake.

At this point in the process, the build is ready to proceed on this particular machine. It is now just a trivial matter of running make and so forth (this was the "uninteresting" portion mentioned earlier, so it is not covered here).