I've been building distros for years, and the most wasteful part of it is running zillions of auto. process that waste most of the build time of each projects looking for mostly the same things.
I always thought it was insane. Perhaps it was a good idea 30 years ago when we were actually building for dozens of 'unstable' variants of UNIX with a dozen compilers, but these days?
And yes, MOST projects can be compiled just fine with a 2 pages Makefile, more often than not with -j for parallel build, and as a bonus, won't keep around a dozen turd files.
Oh also, it is supposed to help 'portability' but MOST of my time is wasted trying to fix autotools configs when it invariably break in some new interesting and arcane ways.
I always thought it was insane. Perhaps it was a good idea 30 years ago when we were actually building for dozens of 'unstable' variants of UNIX with a dozen compilers, but these days?
And yes, MOST projects can be compiled just fine with a 2 pages Makefile, more often than not with -j for parallel build, and as a bonus, won't keep around a dozen turd files.
Oh also, it is supposed to help 'portability' but MOST of my time is wasted trying to fix autotools configs when it invariably break in some new interesting and arcane ways.