Ouch. This is even stronger than JMD's postings. I'll refrain from feeding a flame war, and comment on just one point:
Soren A writes: > In case it isn't clear yet, I am not going to budge on my views > about how bad automake is. (and presumably also autoconf, autoheader and libtool?) So, what are you going to do about it? To put it bluntly, hasn't it always been like this in the Open Source world: there are lots of people who complain (and often rightly) when something is broken (by design, perhaps). But, it's those who show working code that get the attention and peer recognition. I am certain that if somebody would create an elegant, working, unified cross-platform replacement for auto*+libtool+make, written in *one* language of choice (preferrably some Lisp variant, or Perl, instead of the current mixture of C, /bin/sh, m4, and Perl), many software writers would embrace it. --tml
