In your autotools builds for applications, etc., pay close attention to the obsolete macro warning/errors and the option-subdirs warnings. From http://www.gnu.org/software/automake/manual/automake.html : Although using some of the following macros was required in past releases, you should not use any of them in new code. All these macros will be removed in the next major Automake version; if you are still using them, running autoupdate should adjust your configure.ac automatically (see Using autoupdate to Modernize configure.ac in The Autoconf Manual). Do it NOW! I have had several pieces of code hal/dcraw, etc. where I have had to tweak these issues with autotools 1.14. So when 2.0 is released. There may be significant work to do.