Lots of good points.<p>Autotools has a steep learning curve and makes a good deal of project maintainers nervous because it&#x27;s not obvious how it works and it&#x27;s diffult to cut through all the abstraction steps to figure out what-goes-where.  CMake is usually a pretty good alternative to figuring out m4 scripts with autotools.  CMake is usually faster too.<p>Valgrind is good but it doesn&#x27;t work on all platforms and it again needs more examples and howtos.<p>Dtrace too could also use some more blog howtos.<p>Powerful tools need to be both clearly and succinctly explained and sufficiently configurable in order to be widely usable.  The clear conveyance of system behavior should be a top priority for code and supporting documentation.