> Autotools generate a Makefile project That's what all build systems do. Hell, cmake's description is "cross-platform Makefile generator". The rationale is q

> Autotools generate a Makefile project That's what all build systems do. Hell, cmake's description is "cross-platform Makefile generator". The rationale is quite obvious: the DAG part is solved problem. The hard part is extracting platform-dependent info, perform validations, and use it to generate the DAG. And a Makefile is a DAG.