help requested - problem with tool configuration

Hi all,
I'm trying to make an auto* change and I'm running into a tools problem.

This is a small change as a learning experience -- the curve is 
somewhat steep. The change is to solve a definition-in-header issue 
(the socklen_t definition on Mac OS X, to be precise) and requires 
changes to configure.ac and acinclude.m4 for a new test macro.

My problem though is to get the tools set correctly.

My system is running SuSE 9.1 with standard dev tools from that 
distribution. It turns out that the automake version is too old ...
configure.ac:37: require Automake 1.9.0, but have 1.8.3

So I fetched automake-1.9.4 (configure/make/make install) but this 
fails also ...
configure.ac:37: version mismatch.  This is Automake 1.9.4,
configure.ac:37: but the definition used by this AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE
configure.ac:37: comes from Automake 1.8.3.  You should recreate
configure.ac:37: aclocal.m4 with aclocal and run automake again.


I thought therefore that I needed to run the whole autogen.sh sequence, 
starting with aclocal. The automake-1.9.4 has created a new aclocal 
(/usr/local/bin/aclocal) but this does not seem to have created the 
whole set of ".m4" files, only a few of them. In particular, libtool.m4 
is not there, so libtoolize gives errors about missing macros.

Obviously there's a proper sequence for getting and configuring the 
auto* tools, so can someone tell me the right way to do this.

For reference, these are the versions I have presently ...
aclocal (GNU automake) 1.9.4
libtoolize (GNU libtool) 1.5.2
autoconf (GNU Autoconf) 2.59
autoheader (GNU Autoconf) 2.59
automake (GNU automake) 1.9.4


Thanks.....Peter