I disagree with you that autoconf is bad. Its design came from a lot of locally-optimal choices that don't look so good in 2011, and there's a lot of legacy cod

I disagree with you that autoconf is bad. Its design came from a lot of locally-optimal choices that don't look so good in 2011, and there's a lot of legacy code being copied around in people's configure.ac files. To me, it's not perfect, but it's pretty good. Then again, I'm known to my friends as "that guy who knows automake" :-).