[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.