Let's be honest - the autotools bring a nontrivial amount of cruft to the table, and are regarded as "black magic" by most developers. The automated dependency

Let's be honest - the autotools bring a nontrivial amount of cruft to the table, and are regarded as "black magic" by most developers. The automated dependency tracking that I refer to is how automake-generated Makefiles track dependent headers &c. for some compiled languages. That's not at all relevant for the bootstrap project.