installation instructions seem wrong? No configure script

[Dov Kruger]

octave installation is broken on Ubuntu 18.10

I honestly forget whether I installed using apt or snap, but octave is not in, and there is a broken shared library libdouble-conversion.so.1

The same thing happened with emacs but I was able to build from source, so I decided to try building matlab from source.

The instructions call for:

./configure

and either make or

make CFLAGS=-O CXXFLAGS=-O LDFLAGS=

to make without debugging information

There is no configure script. There is configure.ac, but no instructions on how to use autoconf

trying autoconf configure.ac, I get the following error messages:

configure.ac:1: error: possibly undefined macro: dnl

      If this token and others are legitimate, please use m4_pattern_allow.

      See the Autoconf documentation.

configure.ac:61: error: possibly undefined macro: AC_SUBST

configure.ac:78: error: possibly undefined macro: AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE

configure.ac:81: error: possibly undefined macro: AM_SILENT_RULES

configure.ac:85: error: possibly undefined macro: AC_DEFINE

configure.ac:238: error: possibly undefined macro: AM_CONDITIONAL

configure.ac:309: error: possibly undefined macro: AC_MSG_NOTICE

configure.ac:351: error: possibly undefined macro: AC_MSG_CHECKING

configure.ac:352: error: possibly undefined macro: AC_PREPROC_IFELSE

configure.ac:352: error: possibly undefined macro: AC_LANG_SOURCE

configure.ac:358: error: possibly undefined macro: AC_MSG_RESULT

configure.ac:585: error: possibly undefined macro: AC_LANG_PUSH

configure.ac:587: error: possibly undefined macro: AC_LANG_POP

configure.ac:602: error: possibly undefined macro: AC_CHECK_FUNCS

configure.ac:1050: error: possibly undefined macro: AC_MSG_WARN

configure.ac:1078: error: possibly undefined macro: AM_PROG_CC_C_O

configure.ac:1153: error: possibly undefined macro: AC_CACHE_CHECK

configure.ac:1400: error: possibly undefined macro: AC_CHECK_HEADER