Me, on the GPSD mailing list:
Once upon a time, I did not hate autotools. Yea verily, it was the morning of the world and all things (even autotools) seemed fresh and new). I’d say this innocence lasted until about, oh, 1995.
But autotools was a kluge. And it did accrete kluges and crocks around it, adding layers of complexity until it became sore difficult to tell which end was up. And lo, it became a festering pile of special cases and obscure semi-documented rules, leading to a combinatorial explosion of unplanned interactions and obscure lossage.
Like, say, the fact that our make check insists on running gps-makeregress twice and in spite of being a genuine autotools expert with fifteen years of experience bear-wrestling the sorry fscker I cannot figure out why it is doing this.
Oh, there’s a reason, all right. And if I were willing to quintuple the three hours I just spent poking at our build setup I’m sure I could find it. But that was three hours wasted as far as solving any real problem was concerned. Life is too short for such nonsense.
Autotools has reached the Chandrasekhar mass limit of software and become a black hole of suck that consumes endless hours of bright peoples’ time without any good result. It is well past time for it to die.