This is the obsolete (but still used some places) version of autoconf.

From the README file:
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.

Known problems:
the generated configure script is not set as an executable (you can change that
manually example: chmod +x configure)
I will try to check what tool is cursing this, and will try to get the problem
fixed.