Episode: 3041
Title: HPR3041: How to use GNU Autotools
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3041/hpr3041.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-24 15:36:49

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3141 for Monday 30 March 2020.
Today's show is entitled, How to Use New Autos,
and as part of the series, Programming 101, it is hosted by Klaatu
and is about 39 minutes long
and carries a clean flag. The summer is
How to Use New Autos.
This episode of HPR is brought to you by An Honesthost.com
Get 15% discount on all shared hosting with the offer code
HPR15 that's HPR15.
Better web hosting that's Honest and Fair at An Honesthost.com
This is the next episode in my very, very mini series on
Gnu Autotools. The previous episode I took the time to
sell you on the idea of using Gnu Autotools.
Now, broadly, I was selling you on the idea that you should use a build system.
I don't care, I don't have a horse in this race,
I don't care what build system you use,
but honestly, a build system is a good idea.
It's better than no build system.
If you want the reasons for that, then go listen to my previous
Hacker Public Radio episode. I don't know the episode number to
give you right now because I haven't uploaded it.
I'm recording these in quick succession.
We'll just jump into Gnu Autotools here.
This is going to be a sample little project for Gnu Autotools.
I just want to get you familiar with the process because
it's a bit of a puzzle to put together.
Unlike something like Git, where the first command is Git in it
and then you're in Git. You're suddenly using Git.
There's nothing like that for Autotools.
It's not like you can say Autotools create.
Then you've got a project directory.
It's like RPM Dev has something like that too.
There's a couple of different packaging and build systems out there
that kind of give you a place to start.
Whereas Gnu Autotools, it's a little bit less clear
from Autotools itself where you begin.
There is documentation. I would consider it complete
documentation. I do not consider it good documentation.
I mean that in the nicest of ways,
because some people work very hard on the documentation.
The documentation found on Gnu.org slash software slash Autoconf.
It's very complete. It is very thorough.
But it doesn't really step back ever that I could find
and take you through the workflow.
It tells you exactly what needs to be done.
It just never tells you exactly what does that look like.
Sit me down at a desk and show me what I'm going to do
in order to reach that first Autotools project configuration.
That's what I'm hoping this episode,
that's the gap that I hope to fill with this episode.
First of all, to get started with Gnu Autotools,
you need Gnu Autotools.
Strangely, Gnu Autotools isn't actually a thing.
It's kind of confusing, I guess, but it happens.
Gnu Autotools, when we say Autotools,
we're talking about a collective.
We're talking about a group of tools.
One is Automake, the other is Autoconf,
and the other is Make.
You need those three things in order to say
that you are using Gnu Autotools.
Your Linux distribution most certainly includes those
but what they call them is kind of up to the distribution.
You may have to look around, poke around for what packages
consist of Gnu Autotools,
which you might find Automake, you might find Make,
you might find Autoconf, you might find Autoreconf.
Who knows how it'll be split up,
but those are the components that you will need.
Automake, Autoconf, and Make.
You may also need a compiler.
Now, I say May because technically speaking,
you don't need a compiler.
If what you're packaging up does not require compilation.
So, you may or may not need a compiler.
Autotools has a pretty strict directory structure.
It knows exactly what it wants to find
and where those things need to be.
Again, it would be kind of cool if there was like
a Autotools init sort of thing
where it would build that structure for you,
but there isn't.
I mean, it would be easy to script that sort of thing.
You could do this yourself.
But out of the box, as they say,
there is no such thing.
You just have to know that there's a set of expected structure.
So, first of all, your source code should be
in a sub directory called Source or rather SRC.
That's what it expects.
You can change it.
There are variables or rather macros, I guess,
that you can invoke in some of your configuration files
to tell Autotools, oh, by the way,
I didn't put my source in SRC.
I put it over here instead.
So, you can do that.
I'm just saying that...
Like, why would you do that?
You may as well put it into Source.
But there may be a good reason not to.
So, who knows?
I mean, it's up to you.
Point is, it's going to want to see a source directory.
It also wants to see four different files.
News, all capital, N-E-W-S.
Read me, all capitals, R-E-A-D-M-E.
And it does need to be read me.
So, if you've got to read me.M-D for your Git repository,
your Git host, then you'll probably want to simlink,
read me to readme.M-D.
Authors, again, all capitals,
A-U-T-H-O-R-S,
and change log, bizarrely, not all capitals,
but with a capital C and a capital L,
all one string, change log.
If you do not have those files, it will complain.
I almost feel like it'll even say,
that I almost feel like it won't even build.
I could be misremembering that,
but I kind of want to say that it won't build without those files.
So, you need those files.
They can be empty, but they've got to be there.
Okay, so Auto Tools, the initial configuration file
that you're going to want to create,
is a file called configure.ac.
That needs to be out with all these other files,
the change log, and the readme, and the authors, and so on.
So, that's the project's root directory.
Configure.ac needs to be there,
and this is going to be a file with actual content.
Like, this cannot be an empty file.
This is an important file.
The configure.ac is going to be used by Autoconf,
which is a component of the Auto Tools Suite, shall we say.
Specifically, it creates the configure shell script
that users run before building your code.
So, you know that that first famous step
of the Auto Tools in Cantation,
.slashconfigure, make install.
.slashconfigure, that's what this file is going to build.
Now, the cool thing about that is that there's a bunch of standard actions
that .slashconfigure runs through,
and you don't have to worry about the bulk of them.
The ones that you need, for sure,
are like two lines.
There's two sort of, I think of them as variables,
but they're not variables.
They are M4 macros,
and M4 is some kind of arcane programming language,
I think, or configuration language.
You can read all about it, again,
at the GNU.org slash,
software slash AutoCons manual.
I won't go into it.
We can call them macros, pretty safely.
So, the first one that you absolutely need to have
is AC underscore init,
and those are both, it's all capitals.
All the M4 macros, as far as I can recall,
are all capitals.
Actually, there's some custom things
that you can put into something.
Yeah, there are some custom variables
that you can create that don't need to be all capitals.
But, anyway, generally, the macros are going to be all capitals.
So, AC underscore init.
And this is kind of, well, it's an array, I guess,
or a list, at least.
So, you put AC underscore init and then parentheses.
And within those parentheses,
you need three properties.
You need in brackets and square brackets.
You need the name of your project.
Let's call it penguin.
You need the version.
Let's call it 0.1.1.
And you need the contact information of the maintainer.
So, I'll class you at hackerpublicarea.org.
So, each of those properties is in square brackets
and they are all separated by a comma.
So, AC underscore init parentheses,
square bracket penguin,
closed square bracket comma,
square bracket 0.1.1,
or 0.0.1, whatever we're calling it.
A closed square bracket comma,
square bracket,
clat2 at hackerpublicarea.org,
closed square bracket,
closed parentheses.
That's your AC init line.
If we had a fancy auto-tools generation script,
I could imagine that those would be the required arguments
for such a script.
That would make sense.
And then it would insert that line into this file,
configure.ac.
The other macro that you need is
AC underscore output.
I don't remember what it does.
It has to be there.
You're going to want it there.
Just believe.
So, if you were to run auto-conf at this point
and to run auto-conf,
you simply type in AUTO,
CONF, at your prompt,
then a configure script would be generated
from this configure.ac file.
And it would actually run.
Like the configure script
would run and complete successfully.
So, you've just made your...
That's the init step.
You've now got an auto-tools project.
On your hands.
It's got all those little weird required files,
the news, and the authors,
and the change log, and the whatever else.
And it's got a configure.ac file.
Now, it's still missing some things,
but I mean, that's the beginning.
So, if you sort of have a routine
like that initial kind of like,
okay, how do I start one of these again?
This is the thing you're going to want to remember right here.
Make some files,
dump two lines of configuration
into a configure.ac file,
and you're up, up, and away.
Okay, so the next macro
that must be invoked
in the configure.ac file
are some functions to create a make file.
And the make file is the...
that's the second step
of the famous auto-tools invocation.slashconfigure.
That's step one.
We just covered that make.
That's what we're about to do here, basically.
So, the macro for that,
and again, this goes into configure.ac,
is am underscore init underscore auto-make.
It doesn't require any arguments.
You just put it into the file,
and auto-conf knows now
to run a routine called am init auto-make.
And it'll make a bunch of stuff happen.
AC underscore config underscore files
is another thing that you need
in the configure.ac file
that you're working in.
And as an argument,
it requires the thing
that it should be looking at
to build the project.
And in this case,
that's just going to be make file.
So, ac underscore config underscore files
parentheses square bracket make file
with the capital im's
closed square bracket,
closed parentheses.
Those two lines am init auto-make
and ac config files
with the make file as the argument
sets this up for
yes, we're running auto-make
after configure is complete.
So, generally speaking,
your configure ac will contain
those two lines quite
probably exactly like that.
Am init auto-make doesn't take an argument.
You can't give it an argument.
ac config files takes the argument
and it's very, very standard
that the argument is make file.
Because that's sort of just the standard
make that's what make is looking for.
When you run make by default,
it's looking for make file
with a capital m.
You could name it anything you want,
but that would be silly.
So, don't do that.
Just use the normal conventions
you call it make file.
Okay, so,
after that you may or may not need
another macro,
which you may or may not need
to look up yourself.
The macro that I'm possibly
advising, including here,
is something to tell your make
process, your auto-confir,
whether to know that
to need a compiler.
So, for instance,
if you've written a project
in c++, then you would use
the macro ac underscore prog,
a underscore cxx.
If you'd written something in c,
then it would be ac underscore prog,
underscore cc.
And I'm pretty sure there are
a couple of different ones
in addition to that.
And those are listed, again,
on the very complete
documentation for auto-conf,
or rather auto-make, sorry.
So, that's gnu.org slash
software slash auto-make.
And you're looking for the section 8,
the chapter 8 building programs
and libraries.
And it will tell you the
different ac underscore prog
options that are available.
Things for Java with gcj,
which I don't even know if that's
around anymore.
I think that's been deprecated,
if I'm remembering correctly.
Vala, I don't know,
assembly, objective c++.
I didn't know that was a thing
objective c.
All kinds of different ones.
They're there.
You just need to know that
they're there and you need
to know that you need them.
And you may not need them.
If you happen to know that
the thing you're packaging
doesn't have ccode,
or c++ code, or Java code
that needs compiling,
then don't use that line at all.
You can omit it.
And all the real work will be
done by the make file.
And that's not a problem.
I've got many projects
too.
I will have, when I'm finished
converting all my projects
to auto tools,
I will have many projects
that do not require
C or C++ or Java
compilers.
So don't feel like it's
necessary.
It is not required.
That's what I'm trying to say.
Okay.
Next.
Let's actually move on
to the make file.
So the make file,
you might think,
certainly if you were kind of
hacking things together
the way I was,
you might think,
as I did,
that make files are not that hard
to create.
You can make them yourself.
It's not that tough.
Why would you use
a program like auto tools
to make your make file for you?
Well, it turns out
that make files are
kind of easy to make.
They're kind of fun to make
sometimes.
You get to learn weird new
syntax and you get to do
some cool tricks.
But the ones that you make
yourself aren't very complex.
I mean, I've seen some
complex home-written
make files for sure.
But generally speaking,
they cover the things
that you're thinking
need to be covered.
And it's not necessarily
everything that actually
needs to be taken care of.
So letting auto tools
do that for you is very smart.
It's one of the benefits
covered in the previous
auto tools episode.
Go listen to it,
I guess, if you really need
more convincing.
But trust me,
make files can be
a lot more complex than
the way that you're
writing them right now.
So let auto tools
do that for you.
Okay.
So the thing, the template,
I guess we could call it,
that serves as the origin
for your make file
that doesn't exist yet
and won't exist.
You're not going to write
a make file.
So it won't exist
when you're finished
this process.
It is what gets generated
by .slashconfigure.
So the template that
you do create in order to
sort of give auto tools
some guidance is called
makefile.am.
That's a capital M,
makefile,
and then .am.
That's am as in auto make.
And this is used
by .slashconfigure
and then it is actually
invoked by the make command,
by the user
or whoever's building the thing.
Okay. So the syntax
of this is a little bit
little bit weird,
little bit different
and it's a fairly
flexible file
because it is essentially
your opportunity
to override
what auto tools
thinks it should
typically do.
You may not have a whole lot
too override here
and that is okay.
But it is the place
where you're going to specify
some very specific
elements about your project
that you want to be
or you want to have
taken into account.
So for instance,
there are some variables
that you can set in makefile.am.
There's one,
well, I should say,
the variables
are denoted
by their endings.
So I feel like
that's a little bit
unusual.
But for instance,
let's say that you
want to make sure
that from the
bin directory,
a program
is included in the build process.
So to do that,
you would create a variable
called bin,
all lowercase,
underscore,
and then all capitals,
programs,
equals,
what do we say
the project was named
Penguin?
And then
to further elaborate
on what you mean
by bin,
underscore,
programs,
equals,
Penguin,
that's kind of the,
if you've ever made an RPM,
that's kind of the
provides line.
You know,
it's kind of telling you,
hey, when you're finished
running this,
or when you're finished
building this,
you're going to have a
command called Penguin
in your binary folder.
So to further elaborate
on how Penguin
is going to come
into being,
you make a new variable
called Penguin
underscore,
sources,
with sources,
all capitals,
equals,
Penguin.cpp.
So let's unpack
everything here.
So bin underscore
programs,
that tells automake
that it needs to structure,
it's make file,
such that whatever
you've just listed
in bin underscore programs,
needs to end up
in the bin
der,
that's the,
the sort of the
configuration variable,
bin der,
which is usually a combination
of what is it,
exec and bin path,
or something like that,
exec and bin.
So the bin der,
whatever that is defined
as in the dot-slash
configure,
whether it was
defined by dot-slash
configure automatically,
or whether it was
overridden by the user,
because they know
that their bin der
is slash user,
slash,
well, local
slash bin,
but actually I think
that is the default.
Well, they know
that their,
that their bin der
is slash opt,
for instance,
or slash opt bin,
whatever,
wherever they have it,
I don't know
in this imaginary scenario,
a point being,
a user might have
some other plans.
So bin underscore programs
is a variable
that defines,
essentially what's
going to be installed
at the end of this process,
the target,
the payload,
and then,
because these are all
variables, you get
to make them up
yourselves,
but you append them
with these weird,
sort of underscore,
underscore something,
sort of tags,
to identify them
as variables associated
with this other thing.
So penguin underscore sources
simply tells automake
that, well, we have this payload,
and the parts,
it doesn't,
it doesn't exist yet,
the payload doesn't exist,
so in order to get
that payload,
called penguin,
we need to look at
penguin sources,
and penguin sources
is penguin.cpp.
Now, you notice
that you're not telling
it where to find
penguin.cpp,
and remember I said
there were a couple of
directories
that were required
by auto tools,
and one of them
was,
actually the only one
I think that I said
was required,
was SRC.
So penguin.cpp
would need to exist
in the SRC directory
of your project.
So, because it's a default folder,
which is SRC,
you do not have to tell
the program,
the automake program,
where to find the source.
It knows where to find the sources.
It's in SRC.
Now, if you had changed that
or gotten clever
and named it something different,
then you would have to,
you would have to chain,
you would have to override
the defaults,
and I'm not going to go
into that,
because that's, like I said,
don't do that.
There are defaults here
to make your life easier.
So, if that's all you're doing,
you're just building
some source code,
and you expect auto-make
to do that for you,
and install everything
where it needs to go.
You're basically done.
You've told it
what the payload is,
you've told it
where to find the source code
for that payload.
You're done,
sort of.
I mean, if you have a
man page,
you're going to want to,
you're going to want to highlight that as well.
So, for, for man pages,
you do dist underscore,
man underscore,
man's,
all capitals,
M-A-N-S,
equals,
and then, like,
man slash,
example,
or penguin dot eight,
or penguin dot one,
or whatever,
category of man page,
your application
would fit into.
And that's assuming
that you have a man page.
But I'm,
assuming you're kind of
getting the feel for,
for the very,
the structure of the
make file dot A-M,
and again,
you would look all the specifics up
in the documentation
to kind of find out
what your,
what tools are available
to you,
or what variables
you can create,
what classification
of, of variables
you can create.
But that's kind of what
you're doing here.
You're, you're telling auto-make
what you're handing it.
And this is,
to my mind,
when thinking of
RPM packaging,
and when thinking of
Slackware,
Slack builds packaging,
to my mind,
this is kind of that part
in the RPM spec file,
where you're telling the RPM,
when you have finished
building an RPM,
these are the exact files
you should find
in the RPM.
If there is extra stuff
in there,
throw an error
and tell me
what that is,
so that I can audit it.
And I guess
there's no analogy
for Slack builds,
so never mind about that.
But anyway,
so some of the other
options that I,
I feel like
are, they're
worth mentioning
would be auto-make options.
That's all
capitals within underscore,
auto-make,
underscore options.
The salient one
that I'm going to mention
here is the one
that I use a lot.
But again,
look at the documentation
for other options.
But the one
that I use is
foreign subder objects.
So that's foreign space.
Subder-objects.
And what that does is
it tells auto-make
that it's okay
that we are,
it's okay
for it
to look outside
of its standard directory structure.
So it's,
it's okaying
for auto-make
that there are files
potentially outside
of SRC
that it's going to have to deal with.
Those are the foreign sub-directories.
So for instance,
if you did have,
let's say you
had a shell script
that you wanted to install.
It didn't need to be compiled.
Maybe it's a launcher
for your compiled application.
Maybe it's,
I don't know,
a configuration helper
for the user.
Or maybe it's a dot desktop file.
Who knows?
Then those,
that could be defined
as dist underscore,
bin underscore scripts equals
and then for instance,
bin slash
penguin dot sh.
So dist underscore bin is telling it,
when I'm building this for distribution,
I want you to include
this script.
And the script is found in bin slash,
or it's found in the local bin directory
and it's called penguin dot sh.
Of course,
if I had it somewhere else,
I wouldn't tell it was,
I wouldn't say
that it was located in bin
if I had, I don't know,
a script's directory
or something,
then I would tell it,
you may find this one
in scripts slash
penguin dot sh or whatever.
You can include all kinds of things.
You don't have to just,
it doesn't have to be shell scripts
and man pages
and compiled programs.
You can just do extra underscore dist,
all capitals,
extra underscore dist equals
and then list the files,
space-delimited list
of the files that you want
to throw into
the distribution of this,
of the software.
The only other major change
that I can think of
to make
would be a,
a better clean rule.
I don't find that the automake clean rule
is all that great.
I don't know that mine is that great,
either to be honest,
but it does kind of work for me.
I call it nuke,
so I do a make nuke,
and it deletes a bunch of stuff.
So I remove things like
config.status,
configure, config.log,
the make file,
autoimm4te.cash,
aclocal.imm4,
compile, install-sh,
missing, make file.in,
config.gasconfig.sub.
None of those are included
in the make clean directive
in the default make file for some reason.
Definitely the make file wouldn't
probably include a rule
to remove itself.
So that kind of makes sense,
but when I do a make nuke,
I really just kind of want to reset
the whole project back to
having to run auto-conf again,
really is what I want.
Whether that's maybe overkill
is up to you,
it depends,
but just know that
when you start building things
with auto tools,
a lot of files are going to be generated,
and you may feel like
you want to get rid of some of them.
So just kind of be aware of that.
Okay, so that was the make file.am,
rather,
and that's the configure.ac file
we've got that going.
Really you're ready to go,
to be honest.
The way that this is all generated
for the user is going to be
just the dot-slash-configure-make
pseudo-make install.
But you're not just a user.
You're someone who is building
your bootstrapping
and auto tools project
from scratch.
So in order to hand
something over to your users,
that they can do
the mythical dot-slash-configure-make
install,
you need to create support files.
And the way that you do that
is auto-reconf-a-u-t-o-r-e-c-o-n-f,
space-dash-install.
You'll need that option
for it to generate some missing files.
So auto-reconf-space-dash-install
creates a couple of new files
and sets everything up
for distribution, really.
So when you do a make-dist,
that's the command
that auto tools gives you for free.
It's just there in your make-file.
When you do a make-dist,
then it creates
a tar ball
with a copy of your project in it,
with everything that sort of needs to be...
Everything's generated.
Everything's there
that a user needs
to be able to just unzip
or rather untar
and then do a dot-slash-configure-make-install.
So generally speaking
as the developer,
you're going to do a make-dist.
More often than you're going to do,
for instance, dot-slash-configure-make-install.
You'll do a make-dist.
That will package everything up nicely
into a tar ball
for your users.
If it's not for the users,
then it's probably for the packages.
And they'll appreciate that as well.
They'll be able to download this release.
The DIST is kind of your release.
They'll be able to download that,
point their RPM build system to it
or take it into their Slack build tree
or their ports tree
or whatever,
and kind of write some kind of script
or a spec file or whatever they do.
They'll point it at that DIST file
that you've provided for them.
The DIST tar ball.
And their automated system
will unarchive it,
change directory into it,
and run dot-slash-configure-make,
and then probably desk-dure equals
some temporary file location,
or yeah, pseudo-make-install.
And it will just magically work.
Now, if you're building it for your own,
you know, for testing and stuff,
then you'll probably act more like a user,
and you'll manually do a dot-slash-configure,
and then you'll do a make.
And then you probably won't do a make-install.
Maybe you will, I don't know what your setups like,
but you might run something out of the build directory
or you might maybe install it somewhere locally
or maybe you install it into a virtual machine,
who knows,
and then you can run it and test it and so on.
And that's it. That's auto-tools.
That's the process.
And as you can tell, it's not technically that hard.
It's just sort of,
you're just kind of on your own.
That's the biggest drawback,
is that you don't really exactly know
what you need to put into the two essential files that exist.
I'd say that even though configure.ac
is kind of the most mysterious,
because it uses all of these weird,
even for macros that you've never heard of,
and you didn't even know existed until you go searching
through the documentation to find out what they even are
or what are available to you.
And there are a couple.
I mean, there are some good ones.
I mean, there's like,
AC underscore canonical underscore host.
That will probe the system that it's being run on
for the OS, for the host OS.
And then you can do case statements
within your configure.ac
and sort of detect whether one OS needs to be built
and the other doesn't need to be built and so on.
So it's kind of nice.
Like, there are some really neat things that you can do.
There are AM conditionals that you can test.
You could say,
okay, well, is this conditional?
Has this been set to yes?
Because if so,
then we'll build this thing.
And if not, then we'll build this other thing and so on.
And so on.
So there are some good macros to use.
You just have to read up on them and see what they are
and see why you might need to use them
or why you might want to use them.
MakeFile.am is a lot more flexible.
You can make your own rules.
In MakeFile.am, you can make your own.
You can define different settings.
You can create your own MakeFile snippets
to be inserted into existing ones.
So it's, yeah, you can do quite a bit in MakeFile
that gets sort of parsed and translated
and stuck into the resulting MakeFile,
which is super, super powerful.
But it can be a little bit overwhelming almost sometimes
because you just think I don't even know
what I need to do in here.
And the typically the way that I approach it is,
well, I start running it, I start running auto tools,
test builds and stuff with a minimal setup.
Here's the configure.ac with four lines in it.
And here's the minimal MakeFile.am with the really obvious things,
like yes, foreign subter objects.
Yes, here's my man page.
Here's my script or here's my source or whatever.
Now run it and see what happens.
And inevitably something will be missing
and so then you realize, okay, well, what I need to do
is I need to add this rule so that it knows to look over here
for this thing or add this file,
this file has a requirement to the main build rule
or make a new rule to clean up things better and so on.
So it's just kind of, it is iterative, I would say,
at least that's how I approach it.
I mean, maybe there's someone out there who knows it really well
and doesn't have to iterate time and time again,
but that's generally how I do it.
I do the obvious things, run it and then clean up
and sort of make up for what I missed the first time around.
That's about it, I think, that's auto tools in a nutshell.
I hope this has helped, at least,
at the very least I hope this has demystified the process.
It's not a difficult thing,
it is a little bit frustrating at first to learn,
but once you learn it, it pays off in dividends.
Does that make sense? Is that a good thing?
If you pay off in dividends, I feel like it is.
It pays dividends, it gives you lots of benefits
for all of the work that you put into it.
It really does in many, many different ways.
It's such an easy process,
and every package you're on the planet will thank you
because it just makes packaging these things so easy,
because you just tell that you're packaging thing.
Hey, it's a new auto tools project, so treat it this way.
Run this command on it, and you know what you're going to get out.
You know exactly what you're going to end up with,
so it's super easy to package.
It's already done for you, really.
So give it a try if you're distributing something,
and you want it to be easy to repeat and robust
and predictable, try new auto tools.
It is worth it. Thank you for listening.
I will talk to you on the next episode,
and who knows what that will be about.
I don't know yet. We'll find out together.
Bye.
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