&gt; <i>At the risk of having to admit I&#x27;ve had my share of bad experiences with autotools, don&#x27;t ever do that. That is a big sign with flashing lights and sirens, saying that you should put that package down and leave it alone. Because...</i><p>And indeed, the exact issue the OP is complaining about is how the zipfile automatically created by GitHub has NOT had autotools run on it yet, and the maintainer cannot even manually overwrite that file!