CLion for an an autoconf Makefile project? Can't quite figure it out. Follow

I am trying to use CLion with, of all things, the GNU Binutils source code.
I think I found a bug in `ar`, so the thought was that I could use CLion's nice lldb integrations to track it down quickly.

BUT: I am stuck trying to get the "project" up and running, given that it is an autoconf (I think?) project.

Per standard procedure, building goes like:
`./configure --target=arm-none-eabi --prefix=$MY_INSTALL_PATH`
`make -j12`

where $MY_INSTALL_PATH is chosen to by some out-of-source working directory.

The problem I am hitting is that the Makefile analysis picks up on no targets:
`make --just-print --print-directory --keep-going all`
eventually yields the result: `make[2]: *** No rule to make target 'all'.` several times during the analysis.

My Makefile knowledge is rusty, but ... looking at the generated Makefile, I see do see a PHONY target for `all`.
But I ultimately end up with no configurations detected.

This is working with the binutils 2.37 code tarball: https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/binutils/binutils-2.37.tar.xz
although I think this same issue would be common for any "old-fashioned" GNU autoconf/automake/m4 package.

Any thoughts on how I could/should make this work?
I don't need the autoconf to run inside CLion; externally configuring it once would be fine.
Provided I can manually create a Run/Debug configuration to pick up the generated executable (`arm-none-eabi-ar`, in this case), and execute that with the arguments I provide in the config, and get lldb to attach.

Thanks!