Of course there are many alternatives (of the alternatives, I can only really recommend cmake).<p>The problems broadly speaking are:<p>* Assumptions: autotools assumes that only a basic Bourne shell is available, and a basic make, and that make is a good way to build projects.  All of those are questionable, and certainly if you get rid of the assumption that you&#x27;re only allowed to use ancient tools, you could immediately make autotools better, if only by removing all the shell cruft.  But then someone will complain because your project doesn&#x27;t compile on SunOS 4 or whatever.<p>* Familiarity:  When I&#x27;m packaging your project for Fedora, I will <i>not</i> be pleased if you&#x27;ve used some obscure or half-assed build system.  If you&#x27;re using autotools, I may dislike it, but at least I can fix things.<p>The second one is a difficult one, because until your build system gets popular, it will never be familiar, and us packagers will keep cursing you.  Once it&#x27;s popular, it&#x27;ll probably be quite crufty because it has had to handle all the horrible corner cases that autotools can do now.