On 4 Nov 2010, at 03:53, Noah Slater wrote: > Autotools is a big, stinking, POS — but it gets the job done, precisely > because it's been around for 20 years. [1] This software has been tested on > and ported to so many systems, it would make your mind boggle. If you're > distributing source packages to a large user-base, especially with C code, > there are very few sensible alternatives.
Something occurred to me after sending this email. I wrote the CouchDB build system three years ago now. The only major changes I've ever made to it since then have been additions for new pieces of CouchDB proper. The amount of bugs that are found in it are minimal, to say the least. They say that data matures like wine, and software matures like fish — but it's been one of the most enduring bits of code I've probably ever produced. And I credit that entirely to the Autotools maintainers. Hehe.
