Question

I have two similar applications in their own source trees and I am using autotools to build them. In each application’s configure.ac I have:AC_INIT(appname, appversion)
Since the code base is similar and is sharing some code, I’d like to merge them to 1 source tree but I need to have the appname and appversion distinct for each application, can this be achieved using autotools?
I am using PACKAGE_NAME, PACKAGE_VERSION in the application.
My current source structure looks like this:

./configure.ac
./src/Makefile.am
./src/*.cpp
./src/include/*.h

Thanks.

Answer 1

In configure.ac, you could do:

AC_SUBST([APP1VERSION],[1.2.3])
AC_SUBST([APP2VERSION],[0.0.1])
AC_DEFINE_UNQUOTED([APP1VERSION],["$APP1VERSION"],[Version of app 1])
AC_DEFINE_UNQUOTED([APP2VERSION],["$APP2VERSION"],[Version of app 2])

These versions are independent of PACKAGE_VERSION, but in your .c files
you can simply concatenate them:

printf( "%s", PACKAGE_VERSION APP1VERSION );