20. Conditionals

Automake supports a simple type of conditionals.

These conditionals are not the same as conditionals in GNU Make. Automake conditionals are checked at configure time by the ‘configure’ script, and affect the translation from ‘Makefile.in’ to ‘Makefile’. They are based on options passed to ‘configure’ and on results that ‘configure’ has discovered about the host system. GNU Make conditionals are checked at make time, and are based on variables passed to the make program or defined in the ‘Makefile’.

Automake conditionals will work with any make program.