I wanted to make a very small tweak to a C program that I use and figured it should be easy enough (it was), but was flummoxed when it came to building the modified source because there was no configure file. I’m used to the usual build from source routine of ./configure, make, make install, but had never had to deal with a lack of a configure file before. I could have cheated and modified the release source code (tar.gz) (which contains a configure file), but I wanted to work with the repository source.

I found this page when searching for what on earth to do, which was step 7:

$ aclocal
$ automake --add-missing
$ autoconf

In the process I “modernised” the build files and fixed a load of warnings since the version of automake has moved on since the last PWMan release. Nothing clever at all was required on my part here, it was just a matter of using the autohell tools and following the warnings/instructions.