just a some feedback: the current autotools build system doesn't seem to handle out-of-tree builds when running the binary without installation, i.e. it doesn't find the CL kernels in the source tree because it is referring to the CWD - it would probably be a good idea to use cmake instead of autotools, because it handles such dependencies without issues and is also cross-platform ?
No chance of a complete rewrite of the build system for the sake of that sorry. Don't have the resources or time to spend on that and there are far more important things to take care of.