Comment by jschwartzi

Autotools is the de facto build system for most of the GNU system programs. The bit about dependency management mostly fits but I would argue that letting us figure out how to build and install the dependencies is fairly UNIXy. It’s also unclear to me that centralized package managers are necessarily better for security, though they’re easier to use. Also a lot of more modern tools I’ve tried to build in recent months do not give a crap about cross compilation as a use case. At least with autotools its supported by default unless the library authors did something egregious like hard coding the sysroot or toolchain paths.