I've never really met or talked to anyone that had both actually used autotools, and liked them. I find it positively invigorating how enormous the span of huma

I've never really met or talked to anyone that had both actually used autotools, and liked them. I find it positively invigorating how enormous the span of human perception and affinities seems to be. While autotools mostly solves a very hard problem using several strategies and tactics that has come to prove themselves over time in that space, and outside of autotools, many of the implementation choices are absolutely puzzling. M4, the general weirdness of things, and not to mention the 10k+ lines of auto generated shell scripts to probe for features. I've never loved maven, but at least it's insanity is rather symmetric.