14.5 The types of distributions

Automake generates rules to provide archives of the project for distributions in various formats. Their targets are:

dist-bzip2

Generate a bzip2 tar archive of the distribution. bzip2 archives are frequently smaller than gzipped archives.

dist-gzip

Generate a gzip tar archive of the distribution.

dist-shar

Generate a shar archive of the distribution.

dist-zip

Generate a zip archive of the distribution.

dist-tarZ

Generate a compressed tar archive of the distribution.

The rule dist (and its historical synonym dist-all) will create archives in all the enabled formats, Changing Automake's Behavior. By default, only the dist-gzip target is hooked to dist.