We can make GNU build system tries autoreconf or autogen.sh first if we encounter some build issues. But I don't think it's a good idea to remove configure script in the snippet of origin. Because you can't track all files that generated by Autotools. It is also burden for packager to pick the build-time dependencies like libtool, autoconf-archive, gnulib etc. if we force all autotools baseed packages use autoreconf For software developer, they prefer to bundle a generated configure script because it will be a bootstrap problem sometimes. A simple examples,the m4 macro GUILE_PKG defined in guile.m4 helps autotools to check guile installation. If there's no generated configure script. Software user should have guile.m4 to generate configure script. A macro that detects guile installation requires a guile installation to work. Catch 22 :) -- Retrieve my PGP public key: gpg --recv-keys D47A9C8B2AE3905B563D9135BE42B352A9F6821F Zihao