Comment by bjourne

Most of those tips are great, but dont use autotools! The points they give for choosing autotools are exactly the same as one would have read maybe a decade ago when people said that CVS was "good enough" and that it "just works." Subversion, git and several others are much better alternatives and where developed because people weren't happy with CVS quirks and crappiness. One example is waf (http://docs.waf.googlecode.com/git/book_16/single.html), arguably just as well documented as autotools but without all the cruft and generated files madness autotools forces you to go through. CMake (http://www.cmake.org/) is another, used by KDE 4. SCons (http://www.scons.org/) another nice build tool. These also have the advantage of working much better on Windows, a platform autotools is completely alien to.