[alextgordon]

How am I supposed to contribute to your project if the files required to build it are in one place (the tarball) but patches have to be made in another (the git repo)?

If your best practices require you to make potential users and contributors jump through hoops, then maybe those best practices are a bit shit.

[therein]

I do not understand this debate. The project should decide on which autotools version to use and everyone contributing should make sure everything can be generated and installed with roughly the following:

> autoreconf -ivf

> ./configure

> make

> sudo make install

[DiabloD3]

Well, not only that, autoconf and automake files themselves can set a minimum version.

For the problem case of "my version was old, but still executed, and produced a build system that wouldn't build", this has already been handled for a long long time.

But yeah, either autoreconf or explicit autogen.sh works.