I'm not sure what the best solution is, but I agree on the pain dealing with autotools when they fail. Shotgun debugging where you start poking at things randomly can work for some stuff, but never works here.
After working on many different software libraries and frameworks, my firm belief is that you really need to understand the lower layers to use and troubleshoot them effectively.
Best case scenario there are excellent error messages and you can easily review logfiles to understand the root cause of the problem.
But that is rarely the case. Instead you have to have a detailed mental model of the library/framework you're using, and you must be able to quickly picture what it will do internally for the inputs that you give it.
Once you get to that point, many bugs don't appear in the first place because you immediately see that the input/usage doesn't make sense. And the bugs that do happen become much easier to figure out from the output and cryptic error messages you get.
All this to say that it is really unappealing to work on things like bugs in someone else's autotool scripts. I just want to compile the program to run it. I don't want to spend months of my life to understand the inner workings of autotools.
After working on many different software libraries and frameworks, my firm belief is that you really need to understand the lower layers to use and troubleshoot them effectively.
Best case scenario there are excellent error messages and you can easily review logfiles to understand the root cause of the problem.
But that is rarely the case. Instead you have to have a detailed mental model of the library/framework you're using, and you must be able to quickly picture what it will do internally for the inputs that you give it.
Once you get to that point, many bugs don't appear in the first place because you immediately see that the input/usage doesn't make sense. And the bugs that do happen become much easier to figure out from the output and cryptic error messages you get.
All this to say that it is really unappealing to work on things like bugs in someone else's autotool scripts. I just want to compile the program to run it. I don't want to spend months of my life to understand the inner workings of autotools.