[automake] Two CVS Projects, One Build Environment

[Drummonds, Scott B]

Hi, everyone,

I was wondering if someone out there could give me some advice on
setting up the build environment for a project I'm working on.  For this
project I have some code that I want to share between two separate
software projects.  I would like each of these software projects to
conditionally-compile and link my software extensions.

Initially I had hoped to add a switch to configure that would determine
if the add-on code should be compiled.  This works great for configure
but since conditional occurs too far downstream for automake the
Makefiles aren't generated.  This is the type of conditional I'm talking
about:
  AC_ARG_ENABLE([extra],dnl
  [  --enable-extra      Enable extra hooks],[
    ln -s $enableval extra_link
    DIR=extra_link
  ],[
    DIR=extra_stub
  ])
  AC_OUTPUT($DIR/Makefile)

My second guess at this was to just have the add-on code maintain its
own build environment and execute automake independently in that source
tree.  However, there are so many m4 macro files that configure the
build environment in each of the software projects that I'd be forced to
duplicate a lot of code.

So, I wanted to ask this list if anyone has any experience with a setup
like this.  Can anyone recommend a minimal, effective method for having
two separate software projects conditionally build and link a totally
independent source tree?  How do I configure automake (and configure,
for that matter) to do this?

Thanks,
Scott