-Developers should never directly write a Makefile. All Makefiles are
-always automatically generated by ./prepare and later by ./configure
-scripts. Instead, developers must write Makefile.am files. There
-are plenty of examples what they should look like. If you change
-Makefile.am during development you don't have to run ./prepare, just
-run normal make.
-
-Configuration files are the files that ./prepare automatically generates
-and what will be included into public distribution. ./prepare creates
-for example the ./configure script that is not commited to the CVS.
-`configure.in' is the file that developers must edit to change ./configure
-script. After changing one must run ./prepare.
+Developers should never directly write a Makefile. All Makefiles are
+always automatically generated by autodist and later by ./configure
+scripts. Instead, developers must write Makefile.ad files or Makefile.am
+files. If the Makefile needs to include any distdefs (SILC_DIST_XXX),
+then Makefile.ad (.ad stands for autodist) must be written. If the
+Makefile is generic (common to all distributions) then Makefile.am may be
+written. Note that distdefs MUST NOT be used in Makefile.am files, as the
+autodist will modify them. See the source tree for examples. If you
+change Makefile.ad files, the autodist must be rerun.
+
+The autodist also creates the configure.ac script from which the autoconf
+then creates the ./configure script. All changes to configure must
+always be done into the configure.ad scripts. All changes made to
+configure.ac will be lost. The autodist distdefs may also be used in
+configure.ad files. It is also possible to write more than one
+configure.ad in the source tree. All configure.ad fragments will be
+collected from the source tree by autodist and combined into one
+configure.ac scripts. After making changes to configure.ad files the
+autodist must be rerun.
+
+The distdefs are defined in the corresponding distributions. All
+distributions live in distdir/ directory. The distdefs can be used in any
+file in the source tree, but mainly they are used in Makefile.ad,
+configure.ad and source and headers files. See autodist documentation for
+more information how to use distdefs.