different hosts in subprojects

[Ineiev]

I try to mount my project on Autoconf.
it has very heterogeneous software parts, e.g.

(1) fat POSIX host (typically HOST=BUILD=`config.guess')
(2) ARM-based microcontroller without external memory
 (I am used to build tools with arm-elf- prefix)
(3) little AVR appendices.

(2) and (3) are written in C and need configuration,
but they are not portable and the host needs to be forced.

So I split the whole tree into several several subprojects.

I am quite new to Autotools and I am not sure this
was the right way. there are a lot of readings on Autoconf available,
but I could not find a ready solution.

The only that come into my head was to invoke 'configure'
of subprojects recursively, like this:

if test "z$arm_recursion_trigger" != ztriggered;then
 export arm_recursion_trigger=triggered
 #forcing HOST=arm-elf should not imply BUILD=HOST
 config_guessed=$($(echo ${0} | sed "s/configure$/config.guess/"))
 case $# in
  0) ${0} --build=${config_guessed} --host=arm-elf;;
 #if --build is set it should override the guessed value
  *) ${0} --build=${config_guessed} $@ --host=arm-elf;;
 esac
 exit $?
fi

This does not work when included in configure.ac
just after AC_INIT invocation (at least, with Autoconf-2.61),
though the info tells it should. AFAIU from this list,
this is an Autoconf-2.61 AC_INIT bug, although self-made
arguments parsing is deprecated.

Also, I am afraid that recursion may trigger some issues
of caching and regenerating configure scripts.

What is the right way to autoconfiscate such projects?

Regards,


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