my personal frustration with autotools was trying to port code to plan9. i wish autotools had an intermediate file format which described the packages requirements, that way i could have written my own backend to create my config.h and makefiles (or mkfiles) in the end i wrote my own tool which crudely parses a directory of C or F77 sourcecode and uses heuristics to create a config.h and a plan9 mkfile, it was named mkmk(1) it was almost _never_ completely correct, but usually got close enough that the files only needed a little manual hacking. it also took great pains to generate mkfiles that looked hand written; if you are going to auto generate files, make them look nice. -Steve