I'm another grumpy old man, much like I imagine the OP. I have mixed feelings about this topic. I found the autoconf comments amusing, we have supported a pre

I'm another grumpy old man, much like I imagine the OP. I have mixed feelings about this topic. I found the autoconf comments amusing, we have supported a pretty broad range of platforms, from arm to 390's, IRIX to SCO, as well as Linux, Windows, MacOS, and our configure script is 157 lines of shell. Autoconf had its place but I think it was much more useful in the past and now it is baggage. The fact that it is still used (abused?) as much as it is sort of speaks to phk's points. I think the jury is still out on whether the bazaar approach is better or not. It sure is messier but it also seems to adapt faster. I worked at cathedral places like Sun, and while I continue to emulate their approach I also question whether that approach is as nimble as the bazaar approach. I've voted for the older style of more careful development and I think it has worked pretty well for us, we can support our products in the market place and support them well. The cost of that is we move more slowly, we tend to have the "right" answer but it takes us a while to get there. Bazaar approaches tend to come up with answers of varying quality faster. It's really not clear to me which way is better. I'd be interested in hearing from someone / some company that is supporting a lot of picky enterprise customers with some sort of infrastructure product (database, source management, maybe bug tracking) and making a success of it with a bazaar approach. Seems like it would be tough but maybe I'm missing some insight.