> [...] I'm not sure how much I should be blaming autotools versus the projects that use autotools. I'd say that a large portion of the bad name that autotools

> [...] I'm not sure how much I should be blaming autotools versus the projects that use autotools. I'd say that a large portion of the bad name that autotools currently have is due to their users. On one hand developers, who as you say do not actually use all the deductions of configure scripts,. But also users (the ones who blindly type ./configure) are to blame a little. If you complain that you wait while configure checks to find whether your machine is 32 or 64 bits, etc., please read on how to specify "site defaults" once and then all your configure runs take a fraction of the time.