Autotools is crap. Configure on it's own isn't godawful -- it scans for a LOT of Unix variants, and does sniff for features reasonably well. On my more cynical days, I'd say it does a good job of making things portable from unix to unix. Everything else about autotools is unimitigated crap, though.
I've written my own generic make library. The library itself is 95 lines of script, and handles all the dependency sniffing, library and binary building, and so on that I need in a reusable way.[1]
The makefiles themselves just list the sources and object files. They're typically only a few lines, like so[2]:
BIN = mybinary
OBJ = foo.o bar. baz.o
include ../mk/c.mk
I've written my own generic make library. The library itself is 95 lines of script, and handles all the dependency sniffing, library and binary building, and so on that I need in a reusable way.[1]
The makefiles themselves just list the sources and object files. They're typically only a few lines, like so[2]:
That's it.[1] http://git.eigenstate.org/ori/mc.git/tree/mk/c.mk
[2] http://git.eigenstate.org/ori/mc.git/tree/6/Makefile