Configuration management Debian-Automake-autoconf

[Aslak Johannessen]

Hi.

Im currently trying to trans fare a large amount of projects form ad-hoc 
Makefiles to automake and autoconf. One of the  objectives for this 
trans fare is it get debian packages for "free". Meaning that when the 
build is ok the dpkg-buildpackage does the job of making packages.

To make autoconf automake and dpkg-buildpackage run one needs to edit 
and type information into many different files. Mainly Makefile.am 
configure.in and debian/control. Much of this information is duplicated 
and the "need" for a centralized configuration file for each project is 
wished for. At least I think that all of this information is duplicated 
and i can for see a nightmare of maintenance in the future with all ties 
files?

My question is therefor is there such a system for configuration 
management that can handle generation of the correct files or at least 
substitution of them?

Thanks in advanced for any tips or pointers to other how has had such a 
problem before.. or other solutions on how to solve this problem.

--aslak