Alien::autoconf(3)

💖 Alien::autoconf — bestie, let's talk about building or finding autoconf 💖

okay so this is a page from the User Contributed Perl Documentation collection, and it's all about Alien::autoconf, version 0.20. Sit down, grab a strawberry 🍓, we're doing this.

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✨ NAME ✨

Alien::autoconf — Build or find autoconf

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🌸 VERSION 🌸

version 0.20 — that's the one, no cap.

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🦋 SYNOPSIS 🦋

From your script or module:

use Alien::autoconf;
use Env qw( @PATH );

unshift @PATH, Alien::autoconf->bin_dir;

From your alienfile:

use alienfile;

share {
  # Alien::Autotools will pull in:
  #  - Alien::autoconf
  #  - Alien::automake
  #  - Alien::m4
  #  - Alien::libtool
  # all of which you will likely need.
  requires 'Alien::Autotools';
  plugin 'Build::Autoconf';
  build [
    '%{autoreconf} -vfi',
    '%{configure}',
    '%{make}',
    '%{make} install',
  ];
};

like, look at that alienfile just glowing. main character energy fr fr 👑

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🌈 DESCRIPTION 🌈

So this distribution hands you autoconf, right, so that other Perl distributions over on CPAN can actually use it. This is most commonly necessary when creating other Aliens that target a autoconf project that does not ship with a configure script. Which is... a whole situation. 😭

Ideally you should complain to the upstream developers — yes, actually go email them, be brave, bestie. But if you are not able to convince them, then you have this option. There are currently two such Aliens: Alien::libuv and Alien::Hunspell. Two of them. Just vibing there without a configure script. 💀

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💅 METHODS 💅

bin_dir

my @dirs = Alien::autoconf->bin_dir;

Returns a list of directories that need to be added to the PATH in order to use autoconf. That's it, that's the whole method, and honestly? She ate. ✨

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🎀 HELPERS 🎀

This Alien provides the following helpers which will execute the corresponding command. You want to use the helpers because they will use the correct incantation on Windows. Like, do not try to be cute and do it manually, iykyk. 🪟✨

• autoconf
• autoheader
• autom4te
• autoreconf
• autoscan
• autoupdate
• ifname

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👑 SEE ALSO 👑

• alienfile
• Alien::Build
• Alien::Build
• Alien::Autotools

(yes, Alien::Build is listed twice. iconic. we respect it. 💜)

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🫶 AUTHOR 🫶

Author: Graham Ollis <plicease@cpan.org>

Contributors:

• Mark Jensen (MAJENSEN)

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⭐ COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE ⭐

This software is copyright (c) 2017-2022 by Graham Ollis.

This is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as the Perl 5 programming language system itself.

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and that's the whole page, bestie!! mwah 💋 this was generated with perl v5.42.0 on 2025-07-25, and it lives at Alien::autoconf(3) — go build something slay 🌸🦋💖