Problem: "autoreconf -i" fails if you follow the libtool advice and use put this in configure.ac: AC_CONFIG_MACRO_DIR([m4]) and add "-I m4" to ACLOCAL_AMFLAGS in Makefile.am
It will instead report: aclocal: couldn't open directory `m4': No such file or directory autoreconf: aclocal failed with exit status: 1 The whole point of "autoreconf -i" is to create "whatever is needed", and clearly MACRO_DIRs are needed, yet autoreconf fails to do so. Therefore, this is a bug. This is *especially* a problem when using the widely-used "git" tool, because "git" does not store empty directories (only files). The symptom is that you "git clone" a fresh repository, and then "autoreconf -i" fails. You can work around this using: "mkdir m4 ; touch m4/dummy ; git add m4/dummy" or similar, but you shouldn't need to work around this at all. This is already a bug report in Debian: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=565663 reported against automake 1.11. Solution: Please patch aclocal (part of automake) to automatically create these directories. A patch has already been created in 2010: http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.linux.debian.devel.bugs.general/678260 http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.comp.sysutils.automake.patches/3859 --- David A. Wheeler