<p><pre><code>  but autotools looks like someone completely gave up on 
  producing a good, decent or even bad solution and just 
  tried whatever didn&#x27;t completely and utterly fail at the 
  task.
</code></pre>
That is more or less what happened, by their own admission, &quot;why does it look like gorilla spit?&quot;<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gnu.org&#x2F;software&#x2F;autoconf&#x2F;manual&#x2F;autoconf-2.65&#x2F;autoconf.html#History" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gnu.org&#x2F;software&#x2F;autoconf&#x2F;manual&#x2F;autoconf-2.65&#x2F;a...</a><p>Although I disagree that they didn&#x27;t produce a tolerably decent solution. It&#x27;s a near hopeless task to account for the differences of <i>dozens</i> of operating systems, even if most of them are all Unix-like, yet autotools still tried and mostly succeeded. Nowadays some build tools don&#x27;t even attempt to solve this problem and only target Windows, Mac OS X, and Ubuntu, and usually only the latest version of each.