Sure, except that the language used to generate the makefile is substantially harder to read in a lot of cases. And it doesn't tell you important things such as

Sure, except that the language used to generate the makefile is substantially harder to read in a lot of cases. And it doesn't tell you important things such as how libtool paths are configured or what paths are included in the gcc commands. These aren't that important unless you're cross-compiling for a system that doesn't have the same libc, libgcc, or library set and for which you need to set a "sysroot." Different projects have different ways of doing this, and sometimes a project will use something that sets sysroot appropriately for libtool but then doesn't generate the --sysroot command for gcc. For historical reasons Cross Compilation against a different root filesystem for a different target architecture is somewhat of a second-class citizen in most automake/autotools build systems and you really do have to read the makefile output to figure out how they've configured their particular instance.