This is not the autoconf you are looking for. Autoconf is an extensible package of M4 macros that produce shell scripts to automatically configure software source code packages. These scripts can adapt the packages to many kinds of UNIX-like systems without manual user intervention. Autoconf creates a configuration script for a package from a template file that lists the operating system features that the package can use, in the form of M4 macro calls. This msys port of autoconf has been modified specifically for the MSYS System Builder (msys-dvlpr) environment; that is, it is intended to be used only when producing binary packages for the MSYS subsystem. If you intend to produce executables for the native "mingw32" subsystem (that is, applications that should work on Microsoft Windows installations without the MSYS dll), then you should install the mingw32-autoconf-*, mingw32-autoconf2.5-*, and/or mingw32-autoconf2.1-* packages instead.