I'm trying to learn how to use autotools and I can't seem to find a good beginner-friendly answer to this question. What's the difference between autoconf and autoreconf.
autoconf generates the configure script from various input files, some of which are created using other tools like aclocal, automake, etc.
autoreconf is a helper that knows how to call all these tools in the right order
You'll usually just call autoreconf yourself and let it deal with all the lower level tools ....