Go to the first, previous, next, last section, table of contents.
To produce a configure script for a software package, create a
file called `configure.ac' that contains invocations of the
Autoconf macros that test the system features your package needs or can
use.  Autoconf macros already exist to check for many features; see
section Existing Tests, for their descriptions.  For most other features,
you can use Autoconf template macros to produce custom checks; see
section Writing Tests, for information about them.  For especially tricky
or specialized features, `configure.ac' might need to contain some
hand-crafted shell commands; see section Portable Shell Programming.  The
autoscan program can give you a good start in writing
`configure.ac' (see section Using autoscan to Create `configure.ac', for more information).
Previous versions of Autoconf promoted the name `configure.in',
which is somewhat ambiguous (the tool needed to produce this file is not
described by its extension), and introduces a slight confusion with
`config.h.in' and so on (for which `.in' means "to be
processed by configure").  Using `configure.ac' is now
preferred.
Go to the first, previous, next, last section, table of contents.