I think you vastly overestimate the complexity of configure.ac scripts... There are some obscure M4 things you can do, like changing the quoting system, but re

I think you vastly overestimate the complexity of configure.ac scripts... There are some obscure M4 things you can do, like changing the quoting system, but really it's just a macro/templating system to create a POSIX sh script so generally it boils down to running POSIX sh commands, with some templating... Here[0][1] are some autoconf scripts I've written, by hand... [0] https://chiselapp.com/user/rkeene/repository/autoconf/dir?ci=tip&type=tree https://chiselapp.com/user/rkeene/repository/autoconf/dir?ci... [1] https://chiselapp.com/user/rkeene/repository/tcc4tcl/file?name=configure.ac&ci=92bed145cf7bbecbc193b172cf9f757bbd5bce62 https://chiselapp.com/user/rkeene/repository/tcc4tcl/file?na... Now, none of these are individually long, but that's just because I tend to split out common functionality and use pre-written macros from the acx archive where possible. But this shouldn't diminish the point that an autoconf script is really just a knowable (the GNU autoconf manual is good) set of M4 tools to create a POSIX sh script.