I think we misunderstood each other? "It" in my post referred to the Rust cargo package in question. The package ships configure.in, but not the generated conf

I think we misunderstood each other? "It" in my post referred to the Rust cargo package in question. The package ships configure.in, but not the generated configure. You do need autoconf for configure.in -> configure. Similarly, it ships Makefile.am, but not the generated Makefile.in for use with configure. Note how I said "The whole point of autotools is not making your users install them".