This is my attempt at a autoconfiguration environment somewhat like the FSF's hugely complicated configure/autoconf/etc environment, written after the n'th attempt to run GNU configure on an old Linux or FreeBSD system, only to have it throw up its arms in despair upon discovering that the target machine was not a new Redhat or Debian system (this isn't strictly a problem with GNU configure -- there are many MANY open source projects out there that assume all the world's a Centos 7 or macos Sierra box and only use GNU configure because it's the fashion -- but the generated configure files are such a convoluted mess that it is EXTREMELY difficult to force them to work on older machines even if the offending code is perfectly capable of correctly compiling there.) configure.inc is a shell include file that contains scripts to do most of the dirty work of finding out what your build environment should be. configure.sh is a user-written script that uses functions from configure.inc to probe the target system to tell you how to configure the program to compile there. The HOWTO file gives a q&d runthrough of how a configure.sh file is laid out, and the samples subdirectory holds some configure.sh files from various projects of mine. -david parsons (31-Mar-2017)