[bjourne]

Practically, you need an autogen.sh script too because noone knows the command switches and order you need to call aclocal, autoconf and automake in to generate the configure script and Makefile.in files. That's enough for a minimal project. For something larger with subdirectories for src/ docs/ tests/ etc, you need to use one Makefile.am file in each directory and tie it together with the SUBDIRS variable. When you need to do something slightly out of the extra-ordinary (in autotools' world, "ordinary" means compile c, generate man pages and install) like generating doxygen or javadoc documentation, offering an uninstall option or building binaries that are not supposed to be installed, then you have to learn M4 and it's stupid syntax.

Also, autotools amazing features aren't all that. Builds out of the source dir? Eh.. This is 2012 and it doesn't impress anymore. Both waf and SCons can do it no problem. Autotools-projects, on the other hand, seem to always put the object files and linked library in the source directory. Sometimes the built library is put in a hidden directory for some reason I don't understand. Possibly it has something to do with libtool, another kludge on top of autotools one rather would do without. Since modern build tools does not pollute the source directories you basically get make distcheck for free. Waf has it builtin for example and it can easily be extended to also upload your tarballs to your distribution server, sending annoncement emails and what have you.