I agree with Zack. If we can achieve that, then I think the generated
files could be removed from CVS too. No problem then with churn, which
is the major reason to have "blessed" versions of auto-tools. (At least
these days. When Ian put that version onto the ftp site, there was no
released version of auto-tools that worked reliably with binutils.)
As I said on irc, I don't really like the idea of recommending a
particular autoconf/automake version. Having an officially blessed
version makes us (binutils) lazy in keeping up to date in our
Makefile.am/autoconf.ac files, and also means that the latest auto-tools
might not be tested as well as they could be.