title: How to avoid redefining VERSION, PACKAGE, etc
body: <p>I haven't seen any questions relating to GNU autoconf/automake builds, but I'm hoping at least some of you out there are familiar with it.  Here goes:</p>
  
  <p>I have a project (I'll call it myproject) that includes another project (vendor).  The vendor project is a standalone project maintained by someone else.  Including a project like this is fairly <a href="http://www.gnu.org/software/autoconf/manual/autoconf.html#Subdirectories" rel="nofollow noreferrer">straightforward</a>, but in this case there is a tiny snag: each project generates its own <code>config.h</code> file, each of which defines standard macros such as PACKAGE, VERSION, etc.  This means that, during the build, when vendor is being built, I get lots of errors like this:</p>
  
  <pre><code>... warning: "VERSION" redefined
  ... warning: this is the location of the previous definition
  ... warning: "PACKAGE" redefined
  ... warning: this is the location of the previous definition
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>These are just warnings, for the time being at least, but I would like to get rid of them.  The only relevant information I've been able to turn up with a Google search is <a href="http://sourceware.org/ml/automake/2004-03/msg00130.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">this</a> thread on the automake mailing list, which isn't a whole lot of help.  Does anybody else have any better ideas?</p>