When to run make for regular builds?

I would like to automate the building of XEmacs on my system so much as possible. Currently I test for the version.sh file and if it is newer than Makefile in the root of the XEmacs tree, I run configure. However, this always leads to a new build with recompilations of all the src/ . Could anyone suggest a way to be sure configure gets run if needed while at the same time, not running it when only some of the object files or compiled lisp files would need to be replaced? -- Dr. Robert Delius Royar Associate Professor of English Morehead State University Morehead, Kentucky