autotools isn&#x27;t mainly a build system; it&#x27;s a system for preparing a program which will self-configure and build in various systems. Those systems themselves do not have any special tools installed. No Autotools, no GNU-anything.<p>Autotools was intended to solve the problem of how to give the same tarball of code to a user of SunOS 4, Ultrix, HP-UX 8, and so on, such that each of those users could just unpack the tarball, run .&#x2F;configure and then make. (Using the make that came with their OS, not CMake, not GNU Make, not gyp and so on).<p>Some of the requirements don&#x27;t hold as much any more; you can rely on newer POSIX shell features in a configure script, and GNU make is more widely available and so on, but the basic idea is solid: no requirement for any exotic build system just to get the program running.<p>It&#x27;s the <i>implementation</i> that sucks in Autotools. The high level ideas are solid.