> what does the path out look like? Writing portable code? When autoconf was created, there was some incompatibility in system call and library interfaces amongst (l)unix systems. Since ANSI/ISO C and POSIX, much of what autoconf was originally intended to paper over is now standardised on (l)unix systems, which is all that autoconf is intended to cover, I believe.
There are still fringe functions that only some systems have, and autoconf now attempts to probe the outer limits of weirdness, but I suspect that few programs *need* to use the fringe. And where necessary, one can provide alternate implementations of some higher-level abstraction in different .c or .h files.
