Automake is a tool for automatically generating Makefiles compliant with
the GNU Coding Standards. It was inspired by the 4.4BSD make and include
files, but aims to be portable and to conform to the GNU standards for
Makefile variables and targets. Automake is a Perl script. The input files
are called Makefile.am. The output files are called Makefile.in; They are
intended for use with Autoconf. Automake requires certain things to be done
in your configure.in. This package also includes the "aclocal"
program. aclocal is a program to generate an 'aclocal.m4' based on the
contents of 'configure.in'. It is useful as an extensible, maintainable
mechanism for augmenting autoconf.

WWW: https://www.gnu.org/software/automake/