Sane Living with GNU Autotools

This page will attempt to document good practices for dealing with autoconf, automake, etc.

config.h policies

One of Autoconf's jobs is to create the config.h file, which source files can then use to detect various features that configure tested for.

It is important that this header never be included by any headers which will be exported to outside applications (e.g., don't include it in any installed headers in libbamboo). There may be ways to sanitize it for inclusion and export if absolutely necessary, but for now it just causes problems. Goanna 0.5 will require libbambo >= 2.0.3 because of this.