Autotools

Do the expert programmers at /prog/ use the GNU Autotools?

Also, are the Autotools really the de facto tools to create software packages?

make it compile into a shell script
No. Almost half of all the things wrong with Autotools are due to the Autotools faggots trying to cobble it together from m4 and sh scripts.
Unnecessary layers just make the system fragile and hard to debug when it breaks. (Like in, now you have to read machine generated shell code, and try to guess what part of the higher-level specification that caused the error.)