If you are building from GIT, run the script ./autogen.sh first, to make sure that you have all the necessary maintainer tools are installed and to build the actual configuration files. If you have just checked out from GIT, you should add the option "--force" to autogen.sh so that meta data is noticed by autom4te.cache. Then run ./configure --enable-maintainer-mode followed by the usual make. If autogen.sh complains about insufficient versions of the required tools, or the tools are not installed, you may use environment variables to override the default tool names: AUTOMAKE_SUFFIX is used as a suffix for all tools from the automake package. For example AUTOMAKE_SUFFIX="-1.14" ./autogen.sh uses "automake-1.14" and "aclocal-1.14. AUTOMAKE_PREFIX is used as a prefix for all tools from the automake page and may be combined with AUTOMAKE_SUFFIX. e.g.: AUTOMAKE_PREFIX=/usr/foo/bin ./autogen.sh uses "automake" and "aclocal" in the /usr/foo/bin directory. AUTOCONF_SUFFIX is used as a suffix for all tools from the automake package AUTOCONF_PREFIX is used as a prefix for all tools from the automake package GETTEXT_SUFFIX is used as a suffix for all tools from the gettext package GETTEXT_PREFIX is used as a prefix for all tools from the gettext package It is also possible to use the variable name AUTOMAKE, AUTOCONF, ACLOCAL, AUTOHEADER, GETTEXT and MSGMERGE to directly specify the name of the programs to run. It is however better to use the suffix and prefix forms as described above because that does not require knowledge about the actual tools used by autogen.sh. Please don't use autopoint, libtoolize or autoreconf unless you are the current maintainer and want to update the standard configuration files. All those files should be in GIT and only updated manually if the maintainer decides that newer versions are required. The maintainer should also make sure that the required version of automake et al. are properly indicated at the top of configure.ac and take care to copy the files and not merely use symlinks.