The files you want to be reading are configure.ac (formerly configure.in) and Makefile.am. configure is compiled from configure.ac via m4 (no, really) and Makef

The files you want to be reading are configure.ac (formerly configure.in) and Makefile.am. configure is compiled from configure.ac via m4 (no, really) and Makefile.in is compile from Makefile.am by perl. Makefile.in is used to generate Makefile at the end of ./configure (by config.status, actually). Some configure.ac files are a bit hairy, usually because they depend on heaps of optional packages or because they test for all this obsolete stuff that autoscan told them to. Have a look at libfake437[1], MudCore[2] or libtelnet[3] for some in-between examples. [1]: http://code.google.com/p/libfake437/source/browse/#svn%2Ftrunk http://code.google.com/p/libfake437/source/browse/#svn%2Ftru... [2]: https://github.com/endgame/MudCore https://github.com/endgame/MudCore [3]: https://github.com/elanthis/libtelnet https://github.com/elanthis/libtelnet