[BuildTools] The autoconf way of doing the autoconf stuff

[Lou Hafer]

Matej,

> [ ... coin.m4 is overly long and complicated ... ]

        Yeah, hard to argue the point.  I think that was driven home to me about
two years back when I ran DyLP through Ohloh and it pegged it as written in
shell script.  Ohloh separates out autoconf scripts these days, but the count is
sad:  43,000 lines of autoconf script, 36,000 lines of C code (but 20,000 lines
of comment :-)

        That said, there are some reasons for the size of coin.m4.  The main one
is that COIN has to build in non-Linux unix environments (AIX, Solaris, to name
two).  Yeah, I know that autoconf is supposed to just deal with this.  It
doesn't.  Or didn't, as of 2.59.  We've talked of upgrading, but have never had
the time to see what would break.  For good or ill, our user community are
primarily OR specialists, not necessarily knowledgeable when it comes to
building code.

	We really do need to move this forward. But one step at a time. Let's
get the split versioning in place and make good use of gnulib. Once that's 
stabilised, moving up to current autotools should be a priority.

						Lou