Multiple makefiles and rules for CONFIG_HEADER and CONFIG_FILEentries

[Sander Niemeijer <niemeijer at science-and-technology dot nl>]

Hi,

I have a package that uses multiple makefiles: one toplevel makefile 
and some makefiles in subdirectories.
The build in several of these subdirectories requires the use of a 
single include file (lets call it foo.h) that is created from foo.h.in 
by configure. Now I recently discovered that automake places the rules 
to rebuild foo.h from foo.h.in (with the use of a stamp-h* file) in the 
Makefile of the directory where foo.h will appear if that directory has 
a Makefile and otherwise put it in the toplevel Makefile. But it won't 
put these rules in any of the other Makefiles.
Of course this leaves me with a problem if I change foo.h.in and 
perform a make, since for targets in my subdirectories that depend on 
foo.h make won't try to rebuild foo.h and thus these targets won't be 
rebuild either.

I would like to know whether anybody knows a way to have the foo.h.in 
-> foo.h (with appropriate stamp-h* usage) dependencies included in all 
my makefiles that contain targets with dependencies on foo.h.

I'm currently considering to let configure create a separate foo.h in 
each of the directories that need foo.h (through a 
AC_CONFIG_HEADERS([dir1/foo.h:inc/foo.h.in dir2/foo.h:inc/foo.h.in]), 
but I would rather generate only one version of foo.h in the directory 
where foo.h.in resides.

And I already know that using only one Makefile for my project would 
also solve the problem, but I would rather like to know whether my 
problem would also be solvable within a multiple Makefile project.

Regards,
Sander