Bundling CMake subpackage with autoconf project?

[Hartmut Holzgraefe]

Ok, call me crazy,
but i'm trying to fix a rather ... well ... lets say
"interesting" autotools controlled project source base
right now.

One of the "interesting" things in this code base is
that it bundles the source of a few sub packages (for
'convenience' reasons). Most of these were either using
autotools already (so that AC_CONFIG_SUBDIR does the trick)
or were just plain source with minimal handwritten
Makefiles that got autotoolized to some extent now.

One of the sub packages is using CMake though and as
it is still under active development elsewhere maintaining
an autotools setup for it in parallel just for this one
embedded use doesn't really look like the right way to
go here.

So i'm wondering whether there is a at least somehow
sane way to have a CMake subpackage integrated into an
autotools controlled build process.

I'm especially interested in getting things like
"make install", "make dist" and "make distcheck" to
work properly with this, distcheck also including the
need for being able to build with $(top_srcdir) !=
$(top_builddir)

Knowing autoconf and friends rather well by know but only
having scratched the surface of cmake so far (and no real
plans to use it for anything else at this point) this is
the list of hings i thought of being needed so far:

- configure check for cmake binary and version
- mapping of certain configure options to cmake -D settings
- automake mechanism for passing control to cmake makefiles

but there is way more to it for sure.

I have been googling for information whether someone has
tried something similar before already, but every search
that includes both "auto..." and "cmake" tends to come
up with "why i think ... is better" entries only ... :(

--
hartmut