Recently updated my main linux box and couldn’t rebuild one of my own system management tools from 2002. The cause were old #autoconf and #automake artifacts. Spent 2h cleaning up and regenerating from .ac and .am files. Remembered how miserable #autoconf and #automake really are: shell based, slow and dropping a ton of persistent artifacts in my source tree. After finishing, I found #meson as a modern replacement, see: https://mesonbuild.com/Comparisons.html

followup:

While getting my tool to compile, I gave up on getting gnu gettext support for intl to build in my tool - ripped it all out! I don’t have time for this shitty 90s #shell script garbage. Shell scripts are only good at the edge, when a core system/daemon needs to call some user configurable hook which is near fixed-function, and the user is allowed to provide an executable for it. Having that hook be a shell script is aok. Small wrapper for a binary - aok, but NEVER for anything longer.