One of the most common refrains that I hear lately, particularly when people discover Autotools Mythbuster is that we don’t need autotools anymore.
The argument goes as such: since Autotools were designed for portability on ancient systems that nobody really uses anymore, and that most of the modern operating systems have a common interface, whether that is POSIX or C99, the reasons to keep Autotools around are minimal.
This could be true… if your software does nothing that is ever platform specific. Which indeed is possible, but quite rare. Indeed, unpaper has a fairly limited amount of code in its configure.ac, as the lowest level code it has, it’s to read and write files. Indeed, I could have easily used anything else for the build system.
But on the other hand, if you’re doing anything more specific, which usually includes network I/O, you end up with a bit more of a script. Furthermore, if you don’t want to pull a systemd and decide that the latest Linux version is all you want to support, you end up having to figure out alternatives, or at least conditionals to what you can and cannot use. You may not want to do like VLC which supports anything between OS/2 and the latest Apple TV, but there is space between those extremes.
If you’re a library, this is even more important. Because while it might be that you’re not interested in any peculiar systems, it might very well be that one of your consumers is. Going back to the VLC example, I have spent quite a bit of time in the past weekends of this year helping the VLC project by fixing (or helping to fix) the build system of new libraries that are made a dependency of VLC for Android.
So while we have indeed overcome the difficulties of porting across many different UNIX flavours, we still have portability concerns. I would guess that it is true that we should reconsider what Autoconf tests for by default, and in particular there are some tests that are not completely compatible for modern systems (for instance the endianness tests were an obvious failure when MacIntel arrived, as then it would be building the code for both big endian (PPC) and little endian (Intel) — on the other hand, even these concerns are not important anymore, as universal binaries are already out of style.
So yes, I do think we still need portability, and I still think that not requiring a tool that depends on XML RPC libraries is a good side of autotools…