Differences between building from git clone and downloaded zip

I'm trying to build the xcb-util-xrm library manually. I found two links with build instructions one from the issue tracker of i3gaps and one from this bug report here . The instructions in the first link are from 2016, in summary git clone https://github.com/Airblader/xcb-util-xrm cd xcb-util-xrm git submodule update --init ./autogen.sh --prefix=/usr make sudo make install Instructions in the second link are from 2013: > 1) Add LT_INIT to configure.ac > 2) Make autogen.sh do "rm -rf m4; git submodule update --init" My question is, how can I build this library under ubuntu 16.04.1 if I only downloaded and extracted the zip file from git hub ? What I did so far, I added LT_INIT to configure.ac. Then I ran the following command twice, one time with prefix option and once without. Both times I end up with the same result: $ ./autogen.sh --prefix=/usr autoreconf: Entering directory `.' autoreconf: configure.ac: not using Gettext autoreconf: running: aclocal -I m4 autoreconf: configure.ac: tracing autoreconf: running: libtoolize --copy autoreconf: running: /usr/bin/autoconf autoreconf: configure.ac: not using Autoheader autoreconf: running: automake --add-missing --copy --no-force Makefile.am:35: error: 'pkgconfig_DATA' is used but 'pkgconfigdir' is undefined Makefile.am:26: error: 'xcbinclude_HEADERS' is used but 'xcbincludedir' is undefined autoreconf: automake failed with exit status: 1 My next investigation was to open autogen.sh (you can see the content of the file on git hub). This file contains two major commands and the first one autoreconf -v --install || exit 1 returns the whole error stack above. My problem is I don't know how to solve the error: > Makefile.am:35: error: 'pkgconfig_DATA' is used but 'pkgconfigdir' is > undefined I just opened Makefile.am and found the line 35 pkgconfig_DATA = xcb-xrm.pc. And I checked what's the default path for my pkg-config, but till now I have no clue how and where I can define pkgconfigdir. $pkg-config --variable pc_path pkg-config /usr/local/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/pkgconfig:/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig:/usr/local/share/pkgconfig:/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/pkgconfig:/usr/lib/pkgconfig:/usr/share/pkgconfig