How would one setup autotools to build a project for separate architectures, concurrently, on multiple systems?

Question

I've got a C++ project which uses automake and autoconf. I'm new to both of these.

My home directory is network mounted -- the same on every server we have -- and I want to compile and run the project (and its executable) concurrently on separate machines.

Our servers are frequently different architectures. My desktop is 32-bit, but the server is 64-bit, etc.

What options do I use in configure.ac and Makefile.am to compile the object files in separate directories named for the machine architectures? It's relatively simple to do this in a regular Makefile, but I don't know how to set autotools.

Answer 1

If you don't do anything "wrong" or unusual in your configure.ac and Makefile.am setup, this is supported automatically:

mkdir /some/where/build
cd /some/where/build
/else/where/source/configure --options...
make
make install

Basically, you create the build directory anywhere you want (in your case probably on a non-network mount), and call configure from there. This will then build the code in the build directory you have created.