Hi, Does Automake provide any kind of extension mechanism so that one can produce, and possibly share, useful Makefile fragments?
The reason I ask is this. Autoconf seems to gain this ability in part courtesy of Automake's aclocal. If I wrote a useful m4 macro library for Autoconf, in principle I could arrange (perhaps using Autotools itself, or a package manager) to have its m4 files installed into, say, /usr/share/aclocal. Then, anyone with my library "installed" could use its macros simply by referencing them in their project's configure.ac file, in which case aclocal would put them into the aclocal.m4 file for *that* person's project, and that would be distributed. The fragments in the library files would end up in configure.in and eventually their users' configure scripts. Easy. But with Automake, the Makefile.in is built from three and seemingly *only* three places: Makefile.am, configure.ac, automake itself. And as for automake, that really seems to comprise a bunch of Perl code and a bunch of .am files shipped with Automake, with Makefile fragments. There doesn't seem to be any way for the user to hook into this process. Without it there's no way to distribute useful Automake fragments other than to have people manually place them into their project directories and reference them with an Automake `include' directive. That seems cumbersome and error-prone compared to what's available for Autoconf. Does it make sense what I'm asking? Thanks! David Ventimiglia, San Francisco, CA
