coexist multiple versions of automake

[Paul Lew]

Sorry if this has been brought up before.

I would like to propose we modify automake (and autoconf) to allow
multiple versions of automake coexisting on a given system.  In our
work, we used various open source libraries and each one of them work
with a particular version of automake.  This makes it hard for us to
upgrade.  If automake can be specified as automake-1.4 and
automake-1.6 like what tcl did in the past, this will make people's
life a lot easier.

Since I am not familiar with the inner work of automake, for the
already released versions, how hard will it be to patch them to allow
for this?  I would really like to have 2 libraries using different
version of automake to work together.

Thanks in advance.