Checking for built files

[Andrej Prsa]

Hi,

a program I am working on consists of fortran sources that are compiled
with f2c into their C counterparts, linked into a shared library and
then used in the remainder of the program. To facilitate compiling, I
thought of distributing f2c'd C sources in the tarball so that the
users don't need to have f2c installed to compile the code. However, if
someone did `make distclean`, all built C sources would be deleted and
f2c then must be present on a system. What would be a good way to check
for the existence of built sources and to check for f2c in case these
sources are missing?

On a related topic, I found some pertinent advice within the autotoolset
project, but their last release dates back to 2003. How well does
autotoolset integrate with modern autoconf/automake?

Thanks,
Andrej