> Perhaps it was a good idea 30 years ago when we were actually building for dozens of 'unstable' variants of UNIX with a dozen compilers
It wasn't. Back then what was typically getting in your way for porting a piece of software was autotools - and fixing it was typically significantly more complicated than adjusting a well written Makefile would've been. My hate for that autocrap mainly comes from that period.
25 years ago autotools, and their predecessor the Cygnus tools, were a breath of fresh air. Porting stuff was a nightmare (imake, mkmk, many hand-rolled Makefiles that only supported the author's own system) and autotools made it easy, especially if you were running a non-homogeneous collection of Unix and Unix-like systems, including both libc5 and libc6 variants of Linux.
I was living through that era with a zoo of Unix variants to build for (including, but not limited to, AIX, HP-UX, Solaris, IRIS, Tru64 and various Linux flavours) - and I always was excited about stuff that did just have hand rolled Makefiles, as that was something that was way easier to fix as the average software using autotools.
It wasn't. Back then what was typically getting in your way for porting a piece of software was autotools - and fixing it was typically significantly more complicated than adjusting a well written Makefile would've been. My hate for that autocrap mainly comes from that period.