1.1 Quick entry-points

The build system is intended to be a fairly integrated whole, and so this document is intended to be read straight through, rather than act purely as a reference manual. However it should be fairly well cross-referenced, and so depending on your motivations for reading this document, there is more than one reasonable entry-point.

• If you want to build and install a distributed source tarball, then you are probably reading the wrong manual, since this one contains rather more information than you need. To build the distribution you should not need to do more than ./configure; make; make install -- if you do need more than that, that's either a bug, or there's a readme you didn't read. If you need to know more about the options to ./configure, then ./configure --help should provide that. And if you really want or need the gory details, then Section 2.1.5 has them all.
• If you want to start building and using software from the repository, then start with Section 2.6 or Section 3.3 and work outwards from there.
• If you want to add another component to the repository, then you are probably going to have to read quite a lot of the document, but Section 4.1 and Section 4.5 (and indeed most of Section 4) are good places to start.
• There are some FAQs in Section 5.
• There is a reference for the Starlink autoconf macros in Appendix A.