You don't have to know anything very much about
autoreconf, other
than that, if you change one
of the autotools files Makefile.am or
configure.ac., you should probably run
autoreconf to bring everything up to date. In
fact, you probably don't even need that, since the generated
makefiles have these dependencies explicit. The problem
that autoreconf addresses is that when one of
these files is updated, there are
several commands which might need to be re-run, including
aclocal,
autoheader,
libtoolize and
others, and it's a headache
trying to remember which ones are which.