I've used autotools for >15 years now. My $0.02 is the following: - autoconf is horrible but useful. It's bloated, slow, obtuse, and hard to use. But it enc

I've used autotools for >15 years now. My $0.02 is the following: - autoconf is horrible but useful. It's bloated, slow, obtuse, and hard to use. But it encapsulates a portability layer which was useful 15 years ago... and less so today - automake is horrible. A few simple rules in GNU Makefile syntax are good enough for the majority of projects. And it's easier to understand than automake - libtool is horrible. It slows down every build by a factor of ~10. And you'd think that a program dedicated to building C programs would be written in C. You know, for speed. But no... it's written in shell. Horrible, horrible, shell. And it breaks the build. Pass "-L/foo -lbar"? It randomly converts it to an absolute path "/foo/bar.so". Pass in an absolute path so that you can link against the LOCAL build directory for testing? Screw you... it re-writes that to a relative path, and links against the system libraries. - libltdl should be shot. I got rid of it in my projects 5 years ago, and never looked back. Everything sane has dlopen() these days. If you want a nice cross-platform replacement for these tools, look at what nginx has done. ~8K lines of code, largely Makefiles split into ~50 lines. Simple, clean, and well organized.