What is "it"?  The GNU Autotools, a group of utilities developed in the
1990s for the GNU Project.  The authors of this book and I were some
of its principal developers, but it turned out to help solve many
other peoples' problems as well, and many other people contributed to
it.  It is one of the many projects that developed by cooperation
while making what is now often called GNU/Linux.  The community made
the GNU Autotools widespread, as people adopted it for their own programs
and extended it where they found that was needed.  The creation of
Libtool is that type of contribution.

Autoconf, Automake, and Libtool were developed separately, to make
tackling the problem of software configuration more manageable by
partitioning it.  But they were designed to be used as a system, and
they make more sense when you have documentation for the whole system.
This book stands a level above the software packages, giving the
expertise of its authors in using this whole system to its fullest.  It
was written by people who have lived closest to the problems and their
solutions in software.

• Dmitry V. Levin

• autobook