configure

A program by Richard Stallman to discover properties of the current platform and to set up make to compile and install gcc.

Cygnus configure was a similar system developed by K. Richard Pixley in collaboration with Richard Stallman. In 1994, David MacKenzie and others modified autoconf to incorporate all the features of Cygnus configure and many GNU programs, including gcc now use autoconf.

Metaconfig is a similar program used in building Perl.

http://airs.com/ian/configure.