configure:3136: error: The installed version of autoconf does not work.
I don't get that error on GNU/Linux. But I don't think anything system-dependent is going on, either. I installed autoconf 2.70: $ autoconf --version autoconf (GNU Autoconf) 2.70 And then I ran these commands: tar xf automake-1.16.3.tar.xz cd automake-1.16.3 ./configure --prefix=/tmp/am make make install And it all worked fine. https://savannah.gnu.org/support/index.php?110397 I can't follow everything there, but for sure, as Zack says, autotest.m4 is not a configure script, so running autoconf on it doesn't make sense. Zack's other answers also already provide the additional information that I could think of. If you have a reproducible recipe starting from the released tarballs, let us know. --best, karl.