Can this be automade?

[Martijn Ras]

Heya Folks,

I'm working on a project that has a lot of components that all reside in 
their own directory. Before i can make them i need to run a script to 
set up a bunch of links, among which are autogen.sh, configure.ac, 
Makefile.am and the directory containing the m4 macro files.

Following is a sample of my Makefile:

.PHONY:       MyDirectory1 MyDirectory2

all:          MyDirectory1 MyDirectory2

MyDirectory1: create_links.sh
              create_links.sh MyDirectory1
              cd MyDirectory1; ./autogen.sh ; ./configure; make
MyDirectory2: create_links.sh
              create_links.sh MyDirectory2
              cd MyDirectory2; ./autogen.sh ; ./configure; make
There's nothing to be build in the components root directory.
It's getting Makefile painful to maintain the makefile as i'm nearing 
100 components, so i'd like to convert to using automake.

What's preventing me at the moment is that i seem unable to get automake 
configured so that i do not lose the pre-build step of setting up all 
the links.

Any suggestions?

Mazzel,

Martijn.