The beauty of use but steep technical knowledge base that is the GNU Autotool chain and its influence on OpenCOBOL. …
Well met,
OpenCOBOL sources are built around autoconf, automake, autotest, libtool and other utilities known as Autotools, The GNU Build system.
A great overview is posted on wikipedia, with links to all the nitty gritty details. 
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There is a learning curve, steep, full of technical details, but well worth the additional time spent on the front end of a project. Especially as it can be a 'do-once and copy the template for the next one' task.
Typing
$ make distcheck
and having make exercise a clean distribution tarball from creation through test, is when you go … aaahh ok, that's why I spent 27 hours learning Autotools.
Now everyone just needs to run
$ tar xvf next-big-thing-1.0.tar.gz
$ cd next-big-thing-1.0
$ ./configure
$ make
$ make check
$ sudo make install
and your software becomes the Next Big Thing.
See GNU Build system on Wikipedia for more details. There are a LOT of details with Autotools, well worth the struggle of coming to grips with the options available.
Cheers,
Brian
