In Chapter 1, I gave a brief overview of the Autotools and some of the resources that are currently available to help reduce the learning curve. In this chapter, we’re going to step back a little and examine project organization techniques that are applicable to all projects, not just those whose build system is managed by the Autotools.

When you’re done reading this chapter, you should be familiar with the common make targets, and why they exists. You should also have a solid understanding of why projects are organized the way they are. Trust me—by the time you finish this chapter, you’ll already be well on your way to a solid understanding of the GNU Autotools.

Creating a new project directory structure

There are two questions to ask yourself when setting up a new open source software (OSS) project build system:

What platforms will I target?
What do my users expect?

The first is an easy question to answer - you get to decide, but don’t be too restrictive. Free software projects become great due to the number of people who’ve adopted them. Limiting the number of platforms arbitrarily is the direct equivalent of limiting the number of users. Now, why would you want to do that?!

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