I don't agree with you at all. Autotools boil down to a bunch of shell scripts that enable projects to abstract away the OS/distribution while following a somew

I don't agree with you at all. Autotools boil down to a bunch of shell scripts that enable projects to abstract away the OS/distribution while following a somewhat standard structure. And binary packages are completely irrelevant and unrelated, because autotools is a build system, thus designed to help build software. Although the availability of source code packages enabled build systems to be also used as installers, thay does not mean the need for build systems is replaced with plain old installers.