1. Tools for developing, maintaining and distributing software. The dist package is a set of tools meant to ease the construction and maintenance of portable software. The first component is the Configure script generator, metaconfig, which automatically builds the Configure script from your sources. Ideally, the end-user receiving your source code will simply have to read your README file, run the Configure script (which is self-documented), and then run make. The second component is the Makefile.SH generator, which is a generic configured Makefile, reusing some of the information figured out by Configure, and a generic Jmakefile description. The third component is the RCS aware package generator, which is used when it's time to build up the shell archives used to distribute your program. The fourth and latest component is the patch generator, used to make updates of your sources, which can later be applied on the original distribution by using the patch program. The upstream sources for this packlage may be downloaded from CPAN, like so: http://search.cpan.org/doc/RAM/dist-3.0@70 From Debian 3.0r0 APT