Almost all use of DejaGnu is in practice within the context of projects using the GNU autotools (autoconf, automake and libtool). These tools understand DejaGnu and provide specific hooks.

The overall directory structure is as described earlier (see Section 2.3). By convention the tests are all run from a directory named testsuite, but this need not be the case. That directory, as well as containing the tool specific test directories, tool specific configuration directory (lib) and possible a board specific configuration directory should also contain the global configuration file and directories for any test programs that must be compiled.

Autotools programs are usually configured and built in a separate directory structure. runtest will be executed in the testsuite directory, within the build directory hierarchy, not the source hierarchy. It is within this directory that the local configuration file, site.exp will be generated when running make.

There are no explicit changes needed in the use of libtool. However some changes are needed to configure.ac for autoconf and Makefile.am for automake.