4.7 Creating a distribution

Running ‘make dist’ on the ‘hello’ project will create a compressed distribution archive, with a name like ‘hello-1.0.tar.gz’. This is a tar file compressed with gzip. (See GNU tar: an archiver tool. See GNU Gzip: General file (de)compression.)

There are some Automake options that can be used to affect how the distribution is done. Changing the AUTOMAKE_OPTIONS line in Makefile.am to the following:

AUTOMAKE_OPTIONS = foreign dist-xz

leads the distribution archive to be compressed with the xz program, so we get in addition a ‘hello-1.0.tar.xz’ file.