reasons for / against AC_CONFIG_SUBDIRS ?

[tom fogal]

Hi all, I'm looking for some general auto* advice on bundling multiple
packages together.

We have a growing selection of utilities of special purpose interest to
people within my group and maybe a select few other parties doing
similar things.  The majority of these utilities are already autonomous
packages with their own independent autotools-based build system.  The
idea came up that we should just have one tarball that includes all of
these utilities, and a single './configure; make; make install' should
somehow build/install them.

Welp, this *was* a long email but I'll just cut it short -- how is
everyone else making the decision of whether or not to bundle several
packages together (probably via AC_CONFIG_SUBDIRS, but not
necessarily)?  I'm interested in maintainability, understandability,
and avoiding 'code rot' (or build system rot, in this case) over the
long run.  Particularly since I will very likely be off doing other
things in a year, and the current set of people in my group are
unlikely to invest significant time in learning the autotools.

The recent thread "aclocal problem" [1] is relevant, but deals more
with how to merge packages, and not why.

Advice, anecdotes, comments welcome.

-tom

[1] http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/autoconf/2005-09/msg00059.html