Member Avatar for christinetom

Hi again everyone.. Hope you're all having a nice Christmas.

I have a question which I think could sound dumb.

Can anyone tell me if Automake and Autoconf can be used on Windows. I seem to be able to find reference to it
being used with Unix everywhere but nothing on Windows.

Not sure if I have posted this on the right forum but I thought if anyone would know about this you all would.

Thank you :)

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Short answer: Autoconf and Automake are GNU tools built for Unix-like environments, so on Windows they are normally used inside a POSIX-style environment or by switching to a cross-platform build system. As pointed toward a compatibility-layer approach, the practical options are listed below with links and tips.

MSYS2 / MinGW-w64 gives a lightweight POSIX shell plus native Windows toolchains. MSYS2 packages include autoconf, automake, m4, libtool and the usual compilers and make. Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) provides a full Linux userland; inside an Ubuntu/other distro the standard apt packages (autoconf automake build-essential m4 libtool) work the same as on Linux. See MSYS2, MinGW-w64, and WSL for details. The upstream tool pages are here: Autoconf and Automake.

If native Windows support is the goal, many projects either ship generated configure scripts (so end-users do not need Autotools) or migrate to a different system such as CMake, which generates Visual Studio projects and works natively on Windows. Converting an Autotools project to CMake takes effort but can simplify long-term Windows support. See CMake.

Quick practical tips: make sure a POSIX shell plus perl, m4, pkg-config, make and a C compiler are installed before running autoconf/automake. In WSL the install is typically done with apt; in MSYS2 use pacman to install the equivalent packages. If the aim is just to build a released tarball, check whether the project already includes pre-generated configure and Makefile.in files so no Autotools run is required. For cross-compilation to MSVC, expect additional porting work because configure scripts and Makefiles assume Unix tools and GCC-style flags.

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Member Avatar for pritaeas

I haven't found any either. Looks like your only option is to run it under Cygwin.

Member Avatar for christinetom

hmm yes.. I see.
Would anyone know of a Windows equivalent of these tools, maybe under a different name?

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