carussell is suggesting the opposite of autotools in the sense of making a very restricted tool that only allows portable code (at least within the domain of th

carussell is suggesting the opposite of autotools in the sense of making a very restricted tool that only allows portable code (at least within the domain of that tool). By contrast, autotools tries to be expansive in many ways (1) it provides all kinds of bits and pieces of the toolchain, (2) it tries to support all systems by auto-generating build scripts using sniffed the system properties.