odd aclocal/automake depends issue

[Monty Taylor]

Hey all,

First of all, the answer to my question is going to be "don't do that",
but just in case it isn't...

I'm working on a project which allows plugins (project==Drizzle... fork
of MySQL, we have inherited the system from them). The plugin system is
such that you can drop a directory into the plugins dir, and the build
system will find the plug.in file which contains some m4, and register
the dir. This is all great, and works (although the m4 that drives that
isn't for the faint of heart)

The problem I was recently trying to solve is this: if I change a
plug.in file, automake doesn't trigger a re-run of aclocal, et al, Like
I would like it to.

First thing I tried was injecting a list of the found plug.in files into
top level CONFIGURE_DEPENDENCIES - but this only causes
automake/autoconf to be re-run, and not aclocal.

Next thing was to use sinclude to include the files (we had been using
builtin([include],$1) because of bug in aclocal 1.8. I _obviously_ don't
care about aclocal 1.8 anymore, so I ripped that out and used sinclude.
This now causes all the files to show up in am__aclocal_m4_deps. w00t!

EXCEPT...

Now, if I change and of the files, I get
Making all in innobase
cd ../.. && make  am--refresh
cd . && /bin/sh /Users/mordred/src/drizzle/devel/config/missing --run
aclocal-1.10 -I m4
make[3]: Nothing to be done for `all'.
Making all in myisam
cd ../.. && make  am--refresh
cd . && /bin/sh /Users/mordred/src/drizzle/devel/config/missing --run
aclocal-1.10 -I m4

In every dir.

Every time.

Running make -d tells me that, if I had touched plugin/md5/plug.in, that
it always now considers plugin/md5/plug.in newer than aclocal.m4 - and
that missing --run aclocal-1.10 -I m4 call doesn't actually re-gen the
aclocal file.

Am I doing something obviously wrong here? The behavior from sinclude()
is what I want in general, except for the extra rebuilding of aclocal
over and over again...

Thanks!
Monty