autconf newbie asks: why is automake deemed as bad?

[Matt England <me...@mengland.net>]

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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