"Autoconfiscating" a project?

[Levon Altunyan]

Dear members,

I would like to use the GNU Autotools for the following scenario.
I would like to use the already existing GNUMakefiles of a project and their
respective targets and rules. This should be renamed to Makefile.in. I would
like to use it as a template with some place holders which obtain their
values from a specific config file. In this config file I would like to
manually fill in the unit specific information which should be passed to the
template make file. I do not want this to be done by the the GNU Tools
depending on the environment. I just want to separate the list of variables
and their definition's from the "template" (actual GNUMakefile for the
specific subfolder). Is this possible to be done? In the first chapter I
have seen that that the tools may be used to generate files from templates
containing replacement variables, which is what I would like. If possible to
use config file with unit specific information into this template?
But, might be that I have to write my own substitution macros for
autoconfigure or there is an easier way. Can you please include a short
example?

Thanks in advance for your suggestions and answers.

Best Regards,

Levon <address@hidden>