CIRCLE WITH A DOT

@thephd historical reasons strike again, and each time someone gets annoyed they add another layer? i forgot the autoconf layer, i think you get to run that too.
there was makefile and maybe config.h or similar.
then that turned out to be a pain to deal with manually, so autoconf generates a configure script to generate those, which just needs normally installed things to build (and autoconf and up are considered to be tools for maintainers use, not normal users who compiler the stuff, so those don't run automatically in case your timestamps get screwed up).
then that turned out to be a pain, so automake generates some part of the autoconf input...

@thephd i think automake generates Makefile.in and configure, then ./configure reads foo.in and generates foo