Defining a hierarchy of Autotools Projects

[Eazy]

Hi,

I hope I ask the right forum. Forgive me if not.

I have a set of GNU projects that are autotools based (autoconf,
automake and libtool).
Now I need to package them into a combined project that has some
limited code of its own but uses the libs and executables built by
these projects. I would like to package the projects in a way that will
allow the user to install all of them as one entity - avoid the need to
do a separate untar/configure/make/make install for each one of them.

What is the best method for defining such a "top level" autotools based
project?
Is there an automatic way to do that?
Can it be an "autotools" project by itself?

Thanks for your help.

Eitan