The introduction of the previous section (see Upgrading From Version 1) perfectly suits this section...
Autoconf version 2.50 is mostly backward compatible with version 2.13. However, it introduces better ways to do some things, and doesn’t support some of the ugly things in version 2.13. So, depending on how sophisticated your configure.ac files are, you might have to do some manual work in order to upgrade to version 2.50. This chapter points out some problems to watch for when upgrading. Also, perhaps your
configurescripts could benefit from some of the new features in version 2.50; the changes are summarized in the file NEWS in the Autoconf distribution.