diff --git a/CHANGES b/CHANGES
index f6bfb7988..c98a3f670 100644
--- a/CHANGES
+++ b/CHANGES
@@ -6,6 +6,13 @@
 
                                   Changelog
 
+Daniel Stenberg (9 Mar 2009)
+- Andreas Farber made the 'buildconf' script check for the presence of m4
+  scripts to make it detect a bad checkout earlier. People with older
+  checkouts who don't do cvs update with the -d option won't get the new dirs
+  and then will get funny outputs that can be a bit hard to understand and
+  fix.
+  
 Daniel Stenberg (8 Mar 2009)
 - Andre Guibert de Bruet found and fixed a code segment in ssluse.c where the
   allocation of the memory BIO was not being properly checked.
diff --git a/RELEASE-NOTES b/RELEASE-NOTES
index 3dbc5bece..d7cd170a2 100644
--- a/RELEASE-NOTES
+++ b/RELEASE-NOTES
@@ -26,6 +26,6 @@ This release would not have looked like this without help, code, reports and
 advice from friends like these:
 
  Daniel Fandrich, Yang Tse, David James, Chris Deidun, Bill Egert,
- Andre Guibert de Bruet
+ Andre Guibert de Bruet, Andreas Farber
 
         Thanks! (and sorry if I forgot to mention someone)
diff --git a/buildconf b/buildconf
index cf7770823..c6518552e 100755
--- a/buildconf
+++ b/buildconf
@@ -294,6 +294,11 @@ done
 echo "buildconf: running libtoolize"
 $libtoolize --copy --automake --force || die "The libtoolize command failed"
 
+if test ! -f m4/curl-functions.m4; then
+  echo "buildconf: cURL m4 macros not found"
+  exit 1
+fi
+
 echo "buildconf: running aclocal"
 ${ACLOCAL:-aclocal} -I m4 $ACLOCAL_FLAGS || die "The aclocal command line failed"