Although I understand Jeff's explanations about why/when autogen needs to be run, I prefer the lazy approach and offer this script as a way to avoid having to worry about the silly thing.

This commit was SVN r1132.

mpi-up2date

@@ -0,0 +1,4 @@
+svn up
+./autogen.sh
+./configure --prefix=/where/to/install
+make install