> who cares for some extra 5-10 seconds of the "configure" command
For me, it's closer to a minute. "configure" is good enough that it does the job, and it's hard to replace it. "configure" is bad enough that I loathe it with emotions that words cannot describe. It's design is terrible. It's slow. It's opaque and hard to understand. It doesn't understand recursion (module code? pshaw!)
automake is similarly terrible I looked at it 20 years ago, and realized that you could do 110% of what automake does with a simple GNU Makefile. So... that's what I've done.
I used to use libtool and libltdl in FreeRADIUS. They gradually became more pain than they were worth.
libtool is slow and disgusting. Pass "/foo/bar/libbaz.a", and it sometimes magically turns that to "-L/foo/bar -lbaz". Pass "-lbaz", and it sometimes magically turns it into linking against "/foo/bar/libbaz.a".
No, libtool. I know what I'm doing. It shouldn't mangle my build rules!
Couple that with the sheer idiocy of a tool to build C programs which is written in shell script. Really? You couldn't have "configure" assemble "libtool.c" from templates? It would only be 10x faster.
And libltld was just retarded. Depressingly retarded.
I took the effort a few years ago to replace them both. I picked up jlibtool and fixed it. I dumped libltld for just dlopen(). The build for 100K LoC and ~200 files is about 1/4 the time, and most of that is running "configure". Subsequent partial builds are ~2s.
If I every get enough time, I'll replace "configure", too. Many of it's checks are simply unnecessary in 2016. Many of the rest can be templated with simple scripts and GNU makefile rules.
Once that's done, I expect the build to be ~15s start to finish.
The whole debacle around configure / libtool / libltdl shows that terrible software practices aren't new. The whole NPM / left-pad issue is just "configure" writ large.