Build systems

We all know autoconf/automake suck balls. But whenever you see a project that uses its own build system because they "weren't good enough" holy shit do you know you're in for something special. And by special I mean fucking terrible!

Complain what you want. I maintain distributions, and although the auto tools and friends seem shit, they are consistent. They also handle a lot of magic important to distros. And sometimes there are packages who handle their own makefiles, perl being perhaps the worse, not even capable to handle DESTDIR, requiring lots of exceptions.

Long ago I didn't understand why autostuff was there. Now I have seen many nix versions and platforms. Many libraries, and pre installed tools (or the lack of them) and distros with a couple of hundred components. And now I do understand, and am really grateful this stuff is there.