7 Supported objects

Automake supports the creation of build systems which can build and install objects of a variety of types, including programs, libraries and documentation.

These objects are listed in Makefile.am in a variable whose name is based on a “primary”. (See Variables based on primaries). The current primaries, and the types of object they correspond to, are the following:

PROGRAMS

Compiled programs. See Programs.

LIBRARIES

Statically-linked libraries. See Libraries.

LTLIBRARIES

Dynamically-linked libraries. See Shared libraries.

SCRIPTS

Programs which do not need to be compiled, like scripts in high-level programming languages. See Scripts.

DATA

Data files to be accessed by running programs. See Data.

HEADERS

Header files, such as those declaring the interface to a software library. See Headers.

TEXINFOS

MANS

Texinfo documentation and man page documentation respectively. See Documentation.

LISP

PYTHON

JAVA (deprecated)

Respectively Emacs Lisp files, Python files and Java source files to be byte-compiled. (Automake’s support for Java byte-compilation is deprecated.)