You can regenerate, and indeed you have to if you need to add support for a new cpu architecture, for instance. Debian has support in its packaging for making i

You can regenerate, and indeed you have to if you need to add support for a new cpu architecture, for instance. Debian has support in its packaging for making it easy to regenerate configure scripts as part of the package build for this reason: https://wiki.debian.org/Autoreconf https://wiki.debian.org/Autoreconf They say "By _far_ the largest piece of work for any new debian port is updating hundreds of packages to have newer autotools config information so that they will build for the new architecture", which is why putting in the effort to have the package build do it automatically is worthwhile. Presumably FreeBSD could have taken a similar approach for its ports, though of course just tweaking the help string is much less effort.