>>23
You demonstrate a clear case of Xah Leesis.
But I agree with you. The autotools are fucking shit and so is the near entirety of UNIX developer tools. Remember, an excerpt from Kernighan and Mashey's article “The Unix Programming Environment”:
One of the most productive aspects of the Unix environment is its provision of a rich set of small, generally useful programs—tools— for helping with day-to-day programming tasks. The programs shown below are among the more useful. We will use them to illustrate other points in later sections of this article.
wc files: Count lines, words, and characters in files.
pr files: Print files with headings, multiple columns, etc.
lpr files: Spool files onto line printer.
grep pattern files: Print all files containing pattern.
Much of any programmer's work is merely running these and related programs.
How could this be taken seriously?
Even recently, some abominations such as pkg-config have become popular and it is needed for instance to compile with GTK+ or FreeType. Oh, yes, it's been blessed by Freedesktop
!
If a new build system were to be designed, it would absolutely need to be completely isolated from UNIX fucktardedness with a module dedicated to abstracting the UNIX horror.