Re: Adding an external project to autoconf

[Ralf Wildenhues]

* Dan Smithers wrote on Fri, Sep 11, 2009 at 11:57:05AM CEST:
> Keith Marshall wrote:
> > On Wednesday 09 September 2009 16:02:58 Bob Friesenhahn wrote:
> >> the zlib project does not use Autoconf or Automake.  It
> >> only pretends to look like a project which uses Autoconf or
> >> Automake using a hand-written configure and Makefile.in which only
> >> works completely under Linux.
> > 
> > ...and the resemblance is in name only; beyond that, there isn't even 
> > a superficial likeness -- certainly in no way GCS conformant.
> 
> How can I tell autoconf to run the configure without worrying about it?

AC_CONFIG_SUBDIRS([zlib])

will cause zlib/configure to be run if it exists in the source tree.

> Also, is there a way of setting up cascading projects that don't perform
> all the compiler checks for each sub-project?

Not really (rationale: the sub project would not be usable alone then).
But you can use -C aka. --cache-file to greatly speed up the sub
configure scripts.

Cheers,
Ralf