Sorry if this has been brought up before. I would like to propose we modify automake (and autoconf) to allow multiple versions of automake coexisting on a given system. In our work, we used various open source libraries and each one of them work with a particular version of automake. This makes it hard for us to upgrade. If automake can be specified as automake-1.4 and automake-1.6 like what tcl did in the past, this will make people's life a lot easier.
Since I am not familiar with the inner work of automake, for the already released versions, how hard will it be to patch them to allow for this? I would really like to have 2 libraries using different version of automake to work together. Thanks in advance.