Re: how autoreconf works ?

[Ralf Wildenhues]

Hi Vincent,

* Vincent Torri wrote on Mon, Dec 05, 2005 at 09:27:37AM CET:
> 
> I would like to kow how autoreconf works.

The best way to find that out would be to read both its documentation
and its source. :)
(the perl script isn't that unreadable)

For example, for invoking aclocal it uses ACLOCAL_AMFLAGS in
$top_srcdir/Makefile.am.  For another example, it looks for the macros
AC_CONFIG_AUX_DIR, AC_CONFIG_HEADERS, AC_CONFIG_SUBDIRS,
AC_PROG_LIBTOOL, and AM_GNU_GETTEXT in configure.ac, to decide which
tools to run.

> More precisely, I would like to know how it knows which options have
> already been passed a previous call of configure.

Oh, most likely that wasn't autoreconf at all, but
  ./config.status --recheck
  ./config.status
what you were seeing.  Take a look at
  ./config.status --version

to find out how the previous configure run was done.

> I ask that because I use configure to initialize some files, these latter 
> being used by a Makefile. And I would like to do the same thing than 
> autoreconf in that Makefile.

This may be a different question yet, if I understand correctly.
Are you looking for AC_CONFIG_FILES or AC_CONFIG_COMMANDS maybe?

Cheers,
Ralf