configure.bat has to be edited to build configure.exe

When building Qt5.5 from source (clean build), configure.exe has to be built as it is no longer included in the source file zip, but this only happens if there's a file named .gitignore (as far as I could understand from configure.bat, the presence of this file will also trigger a sync of the source files from some git repository).
Shouldn't the condition to build configure.exe be the non-existence of configure.exe and this independently of a sync with a git repository?