Chris's Wiki :: blog/sysadmin/AutoconfValuableFeatures
In the wake of the XZ Utils backdoor, which involved GNU Autoconf, it has been popular to suggest that Autoconf should go away. Some of the people suggesting this have also been proposing that the replacement for Autoconf and the 'configure' scripts it generates be something simpler. As a system administrator who interacts with configure scripts (and autoconf) and who deals with building projects such as OpenZFS, it is my view that people proposing simpler replacements may not be seeing the features that people like me find valuable in practice.
Projects such as OpenZFS and others rely on their configuration system to detect various aspects of the system they're being built on that can't simply be assumed. For OpenZFS, this includes various aspects of the (internal) kernel 'API'; for other projects, such as conserver, this covers things like whether or not the system has IPMI libraries available. As a system administrator building these projects, I want them to automatically detect all of this rather than forcing me to do it by hand to set build options (or demanding that I install all of the libraries and so on that they might possibly want to use).
As a system administrator, one large thing that I find valuable about configure is that it doesn't require me to change anything shipped with the software in order to configure the software. I can configure the software using a command line, which means that I can use various means to save and recall that command line, ranging from 'how to build this here' documentation to automated scripts.
