Really have to agree with the doubters. I have used Autotools since the nineties and I have never been able to understand it or make use of it for a fresh proj

Really have to agree with the doubters. I have used Autotools since the nineties and I have never been able to understand it or make use of it for a fresh project (well once, using some gui tool that completely abstracted away the pain, was incompatible with anything else, and who's name escapes me now) In its day it was a wonder: tar xf; cd ... ; ./configure --prefix=`pwd` ; make ; make test (if you are very lucky) ; make install But times have changed. Interfaces are much more standardised now, and from where I sit it is the "polyglot" problem that is interesting, not different architectures. It is time to pick a winner from all the multitude of tools out there and GNU should go with that....