This is kinda hilarious because, yes, "Autotools is great" [as a consumer]. But autotools and m4 is kinda awful to write IMO.

... and autotools is actively hate-inducing if you have to debug it.

autotools is pretty great for the end-user who wants to compile your code or the distributor who wants to package it up for Debian or whatever.

It’s a crawling horror for the programmer that wants to use autotools as the build solution for their code however, which is the topic under discussion.

This only works in the Unix world, on Mac only for command line tools (but only after installing autoconf and make), and not at all on Windows unless you install a complete Unix environment (cygwin or mingw).

Why would it only work with command line programs on the Mac? That's definitely not true, unless something changed very recently.

Also, you don't need autotools itself to build a autotoolized program. The generated configure script is portable sh.

Not really. the end user doesn't need autotools installed actually. To build the configure script from the "configure.in" file, you need autotools. Go ahead and try!

That's the ideal situation, yes, but god help you when something goes wrong.

It's not that hard. I recently had to debug a memcached configure.in script. But, I consider myself a C programmer, so that fact might be source of bias.