Autotools are not backwards-compatible. Often only a specific version of autotools works. Only the generated configure is supposed to be portable. It's also no

Autotools are not backwards-compatible. Often only a specific version of autotools works. Only the generated configure is supposed to be portable. It's also not the distribution model for an Autotools project. Project distributions would include a handwritten configure file that users would run: The usual `./configure && make && make install`. Since those configure scripts became more and more complex for supporting diverse combinations of compiler and OS, the idea of autotools was for maintainers to generate it. It was not meant to be executed by the user: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Autotools#Usage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Autotools#Usage