OT: how to get help on autotools

[Kevin O'Gorman]

I don't really know where to ask.  Feel free to answer or direct me to
another source of help.

I'm in the third chapter of an online article about autotools, just
starting to use autoconf.  See http://fsmsh.com/2755.

It gives a 2-line configure.ac file and says to run autoreconf.  For
me, it just hangs forever.  At first it did other things to tell me I
hadn't installed autoconf or libtool, for instance, but I have those
now.  But even with -vv for verbose output, it says nothing and just
hangs.

Help?

--
Kevin O'Gorman

programmer, n. an organism that transmutes caffeine into software.