Autotools is slow, ugly, and horrible. There are many better and simpler alternatives that exist now. Source releases shouldn't be pre-processed in any way. Th

Autotools is slow, ugly, and horrible. There are many better and simpler alternatives that exist now. Source releases shouldn't be pre-processed in any way. They should build whatever they need to on-the-fly as part of the build. Other project anti-patterns: 0. Maintaining creaky, fragile, old forks of other projects as dependencies. 1. Git submodules. 2. Too many dependencies. 3. Extremely large code bases that don't prune poor patterns, over-engineering, and dead features. 4. Lots of features. OpenSSL, I'm looking at you. 5. Not signing releases with a passphrase split between multiple developers to requires 2-person keying. Package management/distro/builder/packager anti-patterns: 6. Patching the hell out of a project without pushing fixes upstream. 7. Inability or failure to source upstream from multiple independent sources, compare them, and verify chain/web of trust using cryptographic signatures. 8. Not following reproducible build guidelines. 9. Not using build caching like sccache. 10. Not building from reproducible sources periodically on the client-side to verify binaries are identical to those built by others. 11. Dependency hell of traditional (non-nix) packages importing zillions of packages.