This has been my exact experience. I used autotools for a couple of projects that I wrote in C. Ultimately it wasn’t terrible but I have to say I still don’t un

This has been my exact experience. I used autotools for a couple of projects that I wrote in C. Ultimately it wasn’t terrible but I have to say I still don’t understand most of what autotools was doing under the hood, just that it checked which libraries were installed and yelled loudly if the ones I needed weren’t available. Since then I’ve started rolling very simple Makefiles that just call the compiler. cc will complain loudly when it can’t find the right headers, and for these simple projects I don’t need any configuration flags, so why worry about all the machinery of autotools?