I'm putting together the first "release" for an open source app I've written recently. I have a config script set up to generate a makefile, etc, and the whole process works on both linux and MinGW+Windows. However...

I've noticed that, while the config script always works, the makefile is a bit weird. For example, it seems to run at least part of the config script over again when I execute 'make'. That looks to be the cause of my real problem, which is:
The makefile doesn't work on systems without autoconf installed. It tries to call autoconf, which doesn't exist, and dies. This generally isn't a problem on linux, but other platforms such as mingw are not so sure to have autoconf, so I have to find an option to change this behavior. How is this done?

also I thought it was a timestamp-inconsistency problem, but running autoreconf doesn't help.