I had similar issue and had solved it by installing autoconf-archive

This shows that the auto* things are pieces of archaic sh!t that must DIE as soon as possible.
You have 1000 tools - autoconf, autoreconf, autoconf-archive, autoreconf, automake, configure, bootstrap, m4, libtool, libtoolize. Every project is built using a different combination of these commands. Every project has different style of passing options to ./configure. Which, for cross builds or debug/release builds is pain in the @ss
You get cryptic errors that the AC_SUBST macro is missing, and this is magically resolved either by installing a package or by running a command.

If we used a modern build system like CMake or Meson, the world would be better place.