Last time I built anything that required one of these autotools monstrosities, which was LAME I might add, it gave me some obscure error about not having a suitable type for a signed 64-bit integer. Which was unbelievably stupid since it had just "found" uint64_t for its unsigned counterpart. So I opened its nearly megabyte sized, thirty-two thousand line long configure file to track down the problem. I seem to recall that in the end I fixed it by correcting the placement of some braces around it many nested ifs to fix it.

Now I avoid anything that needs anything like these tools or anything that has a step before running configure from a source code checkout.