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3.2 Creating distribution package(s)

Before creating a new distribution package, you will need to prepare the source tree for the distribution you want to create. After preparing your source tree you will be ready to create a new distribution. The Autodist package provides a simple helper script 'makedist' that may be used to create the distribution. However, if you wish, you may run the Autodist yourself, as the 'makedist' will call Autodist anyway.

To create a new distribution for the distribution you have prepared for, run first './configure' and then 'makedist'.

       makedist

This will run the Autodist and create a new distribution package that is archived with 'tar' and compressed with 'gzip'. If you wish to create packages also compressed with 'bzip2', 'compress' and/or 'zip' you may give one or all of the following options:

       makedist --bzip2 --compress --zip

This example would create, in addition of 'tar.gz' package, also a 'tar.bz2', 'tar.Z' and '.zip' packages. Current version of Autodist does not support archiving with 'shar'.

If you wish to run additional processing for your distributions when they are being packaged you may set 'pre-process-dist-hook', 'post-process-dist-hook, 'pre-dist-hook' and/or 'post-dist-hook' in your distribution file. Also note that any hooks provided by Automake in Makefiles will be run in normal manner.

When creating the distribution Autodist creates a log file, 'makedist.log', that will include messages created by Autodist. It is suggested that this file is checked after distribution is created. For example, when the 'license-header' directive is used to re-license the distribution, the 'makedist.log' will include list of files that were not re-licensed. The log file can be used to verify that the distribution was re-licensed correctly, and fix any possible mistakes.