question about configuring autotools

[Graham Mark]

I'm having trouble configuring the autotools. To explain my trouble I 
need to explain what I'm doing.

I help to support a bunch of software that uses 10-15 third-party 
packages, including autotools. I'm trying to set up a directory 
structure that will make it reasonably easy to replace an outdated 
release of any one of these packages with its current release. "Easy" 
would mean that users of these packages would not have to change 
paths in makefiles or scripts, and that performing the replacement 
would not be unduly burdensome. For various reasons I have to do this 
outside of the usual system directories.

My idea is to have a structure like this:

.../third-party
        /current
                /bin
                /include
                /lib
                ...
        /autoconf-M.N
        /automake-X.Y
        ...

The subdirectories under 'current' would hold pointers to appropriate 
elements in autoconf-M.N, automake-X.Y, and so on. When a new version 
of autoconf, say, is released, it would be installed in 'third-party' 
and the current pointers would be reset to point in there.

I have installed autoconf-2.59, automake-1.9.6, gcc-3.4.4 (holding 
off gcc-4 for now), libtool-1.5.18, and m4-1.4.3, among others. These 
were all configured with the appropriate '--prefix' flag. 'make 
check' worked for all of them; 'make install' seemed OK.

When use autoconf outside of its own directory, I get errors that I 
don't understand. For example, in my home directory I have a 
'configure.ac' that contains

AC_INIT
AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE
AC_PROG_GNU_M4
AM_MISSING_PROG
AC_CONFIG_AUX_DIR(.)
AC_CANONICAL_SYSTEM
AC_PROG_LIBTOOL

aclocal produces

% aclocal
configure.ac:6: warning: AC_ARG_PROGRAM was called before AC_CANONICAL_TARGET
autoconf/general.m4:1657: AC_CANONICAL_TARGET is expanded from...
autoconf/general.m4:1660: AC_CANONICAL_SYSTEM is expanded from...

Running autoconf:

% autoconf
configure.ac:2: error: possibly undefined macro: AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE
      If this token and others are legitimate, please use m4_pattern_allow.
      See the Autoconf documentation.
configure.ac:3: error: possibly undefined macro: AC_PROG_GNU_M4
configure.ac:4: error: possibly undefined macro: AM_MISSING_PROG
configure.ac:7: error: possibly undefined macro: AC_PROG_LIBTOOL

I don't really  know autotools very well, and I have no idea how to 
deal with this. I've tried various things, looked around the 
documentation, checked the web, searched autoconf mail archives, but 
I'm still stuck. I'd appreciate suggestions.

Thanks.

Graham Mark