This is explained in reply to your sibling comment, but the convention on linux for many years is that the source distribution has automake/autotools already run. That way, when you download the source tarball, you know the process is `./configure && make` to make the final binary. The way package maintainers for distributions customize things is (hopefully) by providing flags for configure. The idea is that autotools should only be necessary for developers, not for maintainers.