Yeah, we all knew autoconf was not too great back in 2003 when this was written. It hasn't gotten much better or much worse. I think the only thing that has r

Yeah, we all knew autoconf was not too great back in 2003 when this was written. It hasn't gotten much better or much worse. I think the only thing that has really changed is that there has been a gradual convergence on a smaller number of "platforms" (hardware, OS, and language VMs) so that it is no longer worth the effort of maintaining yet another obscure toolchain to deal with the corner cases. If the standard makefile (or rakefile/setup.py/Makefile.PL) works for Ubuntu, Redhat/Centos, and OS X most developers would consider the job done and move on; they now seem far more willing to tell the people running obscure hardware/os combos that they are SOL unless they can hack the makefiles themselves.