As Russell Shaw wrote:
Autotools are only hard to understand initially, but after that, its
easy to find why your old script doesn't work with the latest
autoconf.
Apparently, a good number of FreeBSD developers don't seem to agree
with you.
Does this mean you always
type the specific autoconfNNN version?
Exactly. You don't get any tool name `autoconf' or `automake'
installed on FreeBSD (at least not through the package system), only
the versionized tools. And autoconf/make-generated Makefiles seem to
not like this at all, at least "make distcheck" doesn't work out of
the box for me even though it did work for Ted, using a slightly
different versioning scheme (autofoo-X.YY instead of autofooXYY).