Not that I think autotools are great, but, to the contrary, feature-detection is exactly what all those macros in configure.ac etc. do, as opposed to cmake whic

Not that I think autotools are great, but, to the contrary, feature-detection is exactly what all those macros in configure.ac etc. do, as opposed to cmake which tries to guess a platform and is a monolith with magical behaviour that nobody groks in its entirety. cmake, for one, is actually a case of the cure being worse than the illness. Already autotools treats Makefiles as output (and many macros shit gmake-specific if/else cascades into it) when the solution is simply using Makefiles properly, and assume POSIX headers/defs in this millenium. See git's Makefile, or those on suckless.org, for how to do it properly.