I&#x27;m on the side of testing for features in a realistic, reasonably modern context which takes into account a set of supported platforms.<p>There is no point in testing for things for decades-old systems if you don&#x27;t have any users on such installations.<p>The Autotools approach isn&#x27;t overkill; it&#x27;s overshoot. To declare something overkill, it has to solve the problem fully. Most of the Autotools-build packages in a GNU&#x2F;Linux distro will not work on ancient systems, so they don&#x27;t actually kill that problem. Even if the configure script actually runs through (unlikely), it will fail to detect things that the programs need. There won&#x27;t be any fallbacks and so things won&#x27;t build. If things happen to build, they might not run properly.<p>Porting requires work.  You don&#x27;t develop on system Y and assume it works for users of system X because you&#x27;re on Autoconf. To call system X supported, you get a system X box with a development environment and port X.  That is why, subsequently, the configure script works on system X flawlessly and everything builds.