Blog posts tagged with 'autotools':
The GNU Build tools, part 1
Date: 24 Apr 2011Tags: [ autotools ] [ gnu ] [ make ]
So there you are, you want to install some tool or application that didn’t come in a package, or you want to use the
latest version. You download the tarball (*.tar.gz file), untar it, do a ./configure && make && make install and all
is well.. But what exactly is it that you are doing? Why must unix users compile everything by themselves? Wouldn’t
life be much easier if we all could download a binary and run it, just like on close source OS’es? Are binaries that
evil that we must compile everything ourselves manually so we know what we are installing. Well, yes and
no…