After quite a few days of digging into the pd autotools system, I put forward the work in the autotools_branch on Github: https://github.com/pure-data/pure-data/pull/16

You can grab is using:

git clone https://github.com/pure-data/pure-data.git -b autotools_updates

I basically went through and updated the configure/makefile system so that it builds on newer versions of OSX, has a lot more configure options, and is cleaned up to aid maintainability. Also, finishing a make results in a bin folder like the src/makefile builds so using in place is easier. Last, for OSX, you can now build an .app bundle via: make app. Details are in the PR discussion.

At this point, I’d like to know if it builds fine on other platforms and, moving forward, would like feedback on the overall changes.

I am also totally willing to update the documentation and add more commenting to the configure.ac & Makefile.am’s to aid maintainability & understanding as I now autotools is, in some ways, black magic. :)