這本書所討論的範圍

1.1 What this book is / 這本書所討論的範圍

This book is a tutorial for Autoconf, Automake and Libtool, hereafter referred to as the GNU Autotools. The GNU manuals that accompany each tools adequately document each tool in isolation. Until now, there has not been a guide that has described how these tools work together.

這本書是 Autoconf, Automake 以及 Libtool 的入門書，這三個工具軟體在本書會以 GNU Autools 稱之。雖然這些工具的用法已經在隨附的 GNU 使用手冊中已充分的記載，但在手冊中這幾件工具是被分開討論的。直到本書撰寫前，都沒有一個使用指引描述這些工具要如何一起使用這些工具。

As these tools have evolved over the years, design decisions have been made by contributors who clearly understand the associated problems, but little documentation exists that captures why things are the way they are. By way of example, one might wonder why some Autoconf macros use shell constructs like:

隨著這些工具的發展，有很多了解所有關連問題的工程師做出設計決策，並貢獻出程式碼。然而，卻只有很少量的文件描述這些設計決策的來龍去脈。比如說，可能有人會好奇，為什麼有些 Autoconf 的巨集使用下面的 shell script 寫法:

if test "x$var" = xbar; then echo yes 1>&5 fi

instead of the simpler:

而不用較精簡的:

if [ $var = bar ]; then echo yes 1>&5 fi

Much of this reasoning is recorded in this book.

有很多這類決策的來龍去脈，都記錄在這本書中。