From the description of https://stackoverflow.com/a/2531841/5983841 and https://stackoverflow.com/a/26832773/5983841 , my understanding is that Makefile.am is not needed in the dist tarball.

I tried

wget https://dist.libuv.org/dist/v1.44.2/libuv-v1.44.2-dist.tar.gz
tar xf libuv-v1.44.2-dist.tar.gz
cd libuv-1.44.2/
mv Makefile.am Makefile.am.bak
./configure
make

it gives error when running make:

tian@tian-B250M-Wind:~/Desktop/playground/garage/libuv-1.44.2$ make
make: *** No rule to make target 'Makefile.am', needed by 'Makefile.in'.  Stop.

CodePudding user response：

I answered there: autotools are intended to be used with free software. A dist tarball for a free software project should include all the files needed for someone to be able to make changes to the project and rebuild it, as they want to: that's the foundational goal of Free Software.

They can't do that if you omit critical build files, like Makefile.am. If they wanted to add a new file or something to the project, they need the Makefile.am to modify it. So it should be included in the dist tarball.

Saying that the file is not required in order to build the software as-is without modification, is not the same thing as saying that it can be omitted.

In this specific case, automake-generated makefiles contain rules to check whether someone modified the Makefile.am file and if so, the rules will re-run automake to ensure everything is up to date and correct so you don't have to remember to do it by hand. However this of course requires that the Makefile.am file be present so make can determine that it's up to date.