> I was excited until I saw "use autotools". People love to gripe about autotools, but if you take the time to understand it and get comfortable with what it i

> I was excited until I saw "use autotools". People love to gripe about autotools, but if you take the time to understand it and get comfortable with what it is and is not, it will get the job done. There are alternatives like cmake, but they just suck differently. I use autotools to manage cross-platform (Linux/glibc, Linux/uclibc, mingw32, OS X) C library projects and their Python extension module wrappers, with heavy dependencies on system-specific functionality and symbol replacement (e.g., if strlcpy isn't in libc, then link in libbsd if you can find it there, otherwise compile our own copy of strlcpy.c). Autoconf is a wonderful tool for this once one RTFMs and gets over the fact that it's a bunch of helpers for writing a shell script, rather than a fully abstracted programming language of its own. Or in the words of Lennart Poettering, "every custom config/makefile/build system is worse for everybody than autotools is": https://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/kay/libabc.git;a=blob_plain;f=README https://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/kay/libabc.git;a=...