Yes, and in fact, it's quite a huge pain even in the packaging side. Everytime I have to deal with autotools in nixpkgs, I end up having to rewrite the derivat

Yes, and in fact, it's quite a huge pain even in the packaging side. Everytime I have to deal with autotools in nixpkgs, I end up having to rewrite the derivation to build from actual freaking source instead of a pre-mangled non-release tarball. In fact, this makes me want to RFC *banning* release tarball usage.