A huge proportion of free software uses the GNU autotools as their build system, yet they are widely misunderstood.

This talk gives an overview of the inner workings of autoconf, automake and libtool. It then goes through the steps of creating software that uses the autotools, and shows how the different Debian build systems integrate with such software.

Best maintaining practices are also covered, as well as techniques to fix common bugs occurring with autotools-using packages.