Over the years I got frustrated with autoconf.

It is quite slow, especially on old machines like Sun Ultra 10. It could take several minutes to run autoconf scripts and then several seconds to compile some small open source package. If you are building large number of packages from something like pkgsrc, the issue is magnified significantly. Even on fast machines with many CPUs, autoconf inhibits parallelization, as it runs its tests sequentially and then many packages repeat the same tests over and over again, it is really bonkers. The issues are quite noticeable when bulk building many packages. 

It has issues correctly detecting features with cross compilers, which is why many packages cannot be cross compiled. For example, with NetBSD you can cross compile base OS on Linux, Solaris, BSD, etc. You could use the same cross compiler to cross compile pkgsrc for many other architectures, but unfortunately many packages just won't build this way.

So I try and keep it simple. I stick to POSIX and use OS name and version for specific cases where I need to resolve portability issues. I mostly link against base OS libraries, so don't need to worry too much about testing for 3rd party software.


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