The GNU Automake and Autoconf tool exist to generate the configure and makefiles needed to compile from source. This is mostly the case when the source is grabbed from a repository and not explicitly released.
aclocal
autoconf
autoheader
automake
should generate a ./configure and a makefile. Sometimes, the snapshots also have a script named autogen.sh or bootstrap.sh to do this automatically. Afterwards you can do
./configure
make
make install
Dependencies
In order to work, you need to have autotools as well as libtools installed.