> Most experience with autoconf/automake is all negative. The promise was "never debug your Makefile ever 
> again!", delivered was "debug the configure script instead!". In practice, with autoconf/automake, you try to run 
> configure, kludge it until it stops crashing, then tweak the incomprehensible Makefiles it produces until the code 
> compiles.
> 
> K.O.

I admit that the new one is fit to my flavor. For a common user, I think, a simple procedure of configure/make/install
is better than changing the Makefile manually because many users are lack of knowledges about Makefile. That's why 
I want to learn autotools. The configure script is generated automatically by "autoconf", so you needn't to debug it. 
For the developer, you need to debug the configure.ac/in files for generating the configure script. For a common user, 
he/she only needs to run it. In fact, some more complex projects like ROOT use AUTOTOOLS and they don't include 
the original files which are needed for generating the "configure" script.  I prefer the MIDAS project includes such a 
script to make the compiling simpler and easier instead of changing the Makefile manually.