but autotools looks like someone completely gave up on producing a good, decent or even bad solution and just tried whatever didn't completely and utterly

but autotools looks like someone completely gave up on producing a good, decent or even bad solution and just tried whatever didn't completely and utterly fail at the task. That is more or less what happened, by their own admission, "why does it look like gorilla spit?" https://www.gnu.org/software/autoconf/manual/autoconf-2.65/autoconf.html#History https://www.gnu.org/software/autoconf/manual/autoconf-2.65/a... Although I disagree that they didn't produce a tolerably decent solution. It's a near hopeless task to account for the differences of dozens of operating systems, even if most of them are all Unix-like, yet autotools still tried and mostly succeeded. Nowadays some build tools don't even attempt to solve this problem and only target Windows, Mac OS X, and Ubuntu, and usually only the latest version of each.