Re: reasons for / against AC_CONFIG_SUBDIRS ?

[Harlan Stenn]

I have had to do this before, including cases where some of the
subdirs did not use autoconf, or used different (older) versions of the
auto* tools than I was running.

I went to a model where I used variables and an "include" file to get the
names of the desired packages (and their versions).  IE, I had a single
file that contained things like:

OPENSSL=openssl-0.9.7e
OPENSSH=openssh-whatever
NTP=ntp-4.2.0

and then had openssl-0.9.7e/, openssh-whatever/, ntp-4.2.0/ subdirs.

In each of those subdirs I had a Makefile.am that *first* ran the config/
subdir (which performed the necessary "configure" step for the package)
and then (using a variable that was not "known" at the time the top-level
auto* tools were run) actually build the package.

The benefits of this were that we could easily accomodate "quirks" in the
different packages, and we could also easily get new versions of packages
going without affecting "production" builds.

H