Automake GSoC idea

[Daniel Herring]

Refactor Automake so it can easily be extended for new file types.

Examples:
- Qt preprocessed files (e.g. moc and linguist generate sources to link)
- IDL files (may generate headers and several sources to link)
- NVidia's CUDA

Automake has many rules baked in; there is no clear extension mechanism. 
The above examples can be handled by a collusion of AC_CONFIG_COMMANDS, 
sed, makefile includes, and recursive make invocations; but its not 
pretty.

Autoconf provides an extension framework via m4.  Automake needs something 
similar.  This would probably be an API for looking at declared source 
lists, outputting makefile snippets, reusing dependency-generation 
templates, etc.  A process for automake to output templates to be expanded 
by configure and later included would also be nice.

Later,
Daniel

P.S.  I'm employed, but not with enough free time to mentor this.  I could 
help by providing case studies of tasks that aren't easy with automake.