Even worse, autotools doesn&#x27;t have the concept of modularization.<p>Look at the nginx configure scripts.  They&#x27;re hand-written, and modularized.  Check for &quot;foo&quot;?  There&#x27;s a shell script.  Autotools does the same thing via special-purpose autogenerated shell code.<p>That&#x27;s why the configure script is 1000&#x27;s to 10&#x27;s of 1000&#x27;s of lines of shell script.  It&#x27;s all auto-generated crap.<p>And autotools doesn&#x27;t have the concept of bootstrapping.  Building a C program?  Great!  Test <i>everything</i> with shell scripts.  It might be more efficient to have C programs doing work, but no... it has to be the lowest common denominator.<p>Because managing multiple pieces is too hard.  Why?  Because there&#x27;s no modularization.<p>I&#x27;ve used autotools for decades because everything else is worse.  But I have a long-term deep-seated loathing of it which is hard to put into words.