autconf newbie asks: why is automake deemed as bad?

I'm a newbie project manager trying to feel my way around autoconf (and am
reading the manual at
<http://www.gnu.org/software/autoconf/manual/index.html>).

I see comments here about autconf deemed as "good" automake deemed as "less
then good":

http://subversion.tigris.org/hacking.html#configury

...and I have no preconceived notions about these things, I'm just trying
to understand why this is, and how/if I should use automake. Judging by
the comments from the above link, I suspect I want to avoid automake and
only use autoconf. (eg, automake calls ./configure? ugh.)

My initial goal: make sure the developers/users/builders have the proper
environment/dependencies (headers and libs for Boost, OpenSSL, libpqxx etc)
set up for any attempted build of my project's software tarball or svn
checkout.

If this is a bad place for me to engage in this conversation, please let me
know. I wanted to get an unbiased perspective per the above link in
addition to conversations I start on the autoconf email list.

-Matt

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Received on Sun Apr 2 05:57:46 2006