automake/autoconf problem

hi,

i'm fairly new with automake and i ran into a problem that i have found no solution for. so i have a setup where i don't want all the output files generated by the compiler and alike in my src directory, instead i created a build/unix folder and i have build/unix/config set for AC_CONFIG_AUX_DIR. then i ran ../../configure from here and everything works just fine. however when i wanted to add platform specific options and used AC_CANONICAL_SYSTEM then configure was unable to locate anything from the config directory (like install-sh).

another thing i tried is to put all the configuration files into build/unix and ran configure with --srdir=../../src but it failed on sanity check with the following error: "ls -t appears to fal"

any suggestions how should i solve this problem or is there a good guide that have some more complex examples?

thanks in advance