VR Juggler uses tools from the GNU Autoconf package for automatically generating its configure script and its template configuration header file (vrjDefines.h). The command autoconf is used to “compile” the file configure.in in the top-level directory into the configure script, aptly named configure. autoheader reads both configure.in and acconfig.h to generate the template file vrjDefines.h.in which the configure script later uses to generate vrjDefines.h.

It is important that the generated files remain synchronized with their templates for proper compiling of the library. To facilitate this, revision numbers of configure.in and acconfig.h are available at the tops of the files, and these can be compared against the revision number of configure and vrjDefines.h.in. If the numbers do not match, it is best to run autoconf and/or autoheader to get everything up to date. Typically, autoconf needs to be used far more frequently than autoheader, but there are times when changes made only to configure.in require that both be run. It hurts nothing to run both whenever configure.in is updated.

Note that it is possible to use a configure script generated on a UNIX platform in a Win32 environment. The version of sh.exe distributed in juggler-tools.zip handles the UNIX newline characters. It is, however, not possible to use a configure script generated in a Win32 environment on a UNIX platform. The ^M characters confuse the shell and cause the script to fail immediately.