How to Write Portable C Without Complicating Your Build
The article downplays a little bit the value of the autotools. It's not just about building for 30-year ago hosts, it's also about providing a lot of convenient tools and providing the user with a known interface. If you write your own configure, people may expect to be able to pass additional CFLAGS (not overriding the existing one), setting the path to various elements, installing in a different root, having certain targets for the generated makefiles (like dist, clean, install, uninstall), having cross-compilation work (including crosscompiling to Windows with mingw64 which solves the toolchain problem of releasing binaries for Windows), ... It's a tedious task and easy to get wrong.<p>On the other hand, using the autotools in a modern way is dead easy. You don't need to add many many tests if you don't intend to support old stuff. You get access to automake which is a fantastic tool on its own.<p>Don't read old tutorials, don't look at how big established projects are doing, look at the Autotools Mythbuster instead (autotools.io) and start with a minimal configure.ac.