Rejuvenating Autoconf
&gt; if your customers need to be able to build a shared library on Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, IRIX, and all the BSDs<p>Are there even any notable commercial projects that use autotools?<p>Autoconf solves problems that existed in the 90s unix market which are just not very interesting or relevant today. For a few decades now &quot;portable&quot; has meant linux, windows and mac.<p>A lot of effort is spent on generating shell scripts for the lowest common denominator and this is both useless (nobody cares about 90s unix, everybody can install bash) and insufficient (bourne shell is not native on windows).<p>Perhaps energy would be better spend on migrating everybody towards newer build systems or just plain makefiles. A lot of projects have migrated already, does anyone have statistics about what percentage of a distro like Debian needs autotools?