Lots of good points. Autotools has a steep learning curve and makes a good deal of project maintainers nervous because it's not obvious how it works and it's d

Lots of good points. Autotools has a steep learning curve and makes a good deal of project maintainers nervous because it's not obvious how it works and it's diffult to cut through all the abstraction steps to figure out what-goes-where. CMake is usually a pretty good alternative to figuring out m4 scripts with autotools. CMake is usually faster too. Valgrind is good but it doesn't work on all platforms and it again needs more examples and howtos. Dtrace too could also use some more blog howtos. Powerful tools need to be both clearly and succinctly explained and sufficiently configurable in order to be widely usable. The clear conveyance of system behavior should be a top priority for code and supporting documentation.