I will  not try to argue in  favor of autoconf w.r.t  to other methods
but, as far  as autoconf is concerned, I  already wrote a configure.in
for  ocaml  programs  which   sets  the  following  variables  (to  be
substituted in a Makefile or in any other file):

#   OCAMLC        "ocamlc" if present in the path, or a failure
#                 or "ocamlc.opt" if present with same version number as ocamlc
#   OCAMLOPT      "ocamlopt" (or "ocamlopt.opt" if present), or "no"
#   OCAMLBEST     either "byte" if no native compiler was found, 
#                 or "opt" otherwise
#   OCAMLDEP      "ocamldep"
#   OCAMLLEX      "ocamllex" (or "ocamllex.opt" if present)
#   OCAMLYACC     "ocamlyac"
#   OCAMLLIB      the path to the ocaml standard library
#   OCAMLVERSION  the ocaml version number
#   OCAMLWEB      "ocamlweb" (not mandatory)
#   OCAMLWIN32    "yes"/"no" depending on Sys.os_type = "Win32"
#   EXE           ".exe" if OCAMLWIN32=yes, "" otherwise

This configure.in can be fetched from 
http://www.lri.fr/~filliatr/software.en.html

As  already  mentioned  in  this  thread,  adding  checks  for  (caml)
libraries is not difficult.

Hope this helps,
-- 
Jean-Christophe Filliâtre (http://www.lri.fr/~filliatr)

-------------------
To unsubscribe, mail caml-list-request@inria.fr Archives: http://caml.inria.fr
Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs FAQ: http://caml.inria.fr/FAQ/
Beginner's list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners