I had real trouble using autoconf back when the documentation wasn't very good (it may have become more newbie friendly but I'm not sure). In the end I wrote my

I had real trouble using autoconf back when the documentation wasn't very good (it may have become more newbie friendly but I'm not sure). In the end I wrote my own configure script in bourne shell. The shell script suited my needs fine and was much faster. The selling point of the autoconf tools is that writing your own shell script is tedious and error prone. This was not my experience.