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4.12 Configuring Other Packages in Subdirectories

In most situations, calling AC_OUTPUT is sufficient to produce makefiles in subdirectories. However, configure scripts that control more than one independent package can use AC_CONFIG_SUBDIRS to run configure scripts for other packages in subdirectories.

— Macro: AC_CONFIG_SUBDIRS (dir ...)

Make AC_OUTPUT run configure in each subdirectory dir in the given blank-or-newline-separated list. Each dir should be a literal, i.e., please do not use:

          if test "$package_foo_enabled" = yes; then
            $my_subdirs="$my_subdirs foo"
          fi
          AC_CONFIG_SUBDIRS([$my_subdirs])
     

because this prevents `./configure --help=recursive' from displaying the options of the package foo. Instead, you should write:

          if test "$package_foo_enabled" = yes; then
            AC_CONFIG_SUBDIRS([foo])
          fi
     

If a given dir is not found, an error is reported: if the subdirectory is optional, write:

          if test -d "$srcdir/foo"; then
            AC_CONFIG_SUBDIRS([foo])
          fi
     

If a given dir contains configure.gnu, it is run instead of configure. This is for packages that might use a non-Autoconf script Configure, which can't be called through a wrapper configure since it would be the same file on case-insensitive file systems. Likewise, if a dir contains configure.in but no configure, the Cygnus configure script found by AC_CONFIG_AUX_DIR is used.

The subdirectory configure scripts are given the same command line options that were given to this configure script, with minor changes if needed, which include:

This macro also sets the output variable subdirs to the list of directories `dir ...'. Make rules can use this variable to determine which subdirectories to recurse into.

This macro may be called multiple times.