> A recent HN submission shows a ./configure system made from scratch using makefiles, which parallelizes the tests. That could be a good starting point for a C on Linux project today.

Not everything is C, or GNU/Linux. The example also misses much of the basic functionality that makes GNU autotools amazing.

The major benefit of GNU autotools is that it works well, specially for new platforms and cross compilation. If all you care about is your own system, a simple Makefile will do just fine. And with GNU autotools you can also pick to just use GNU autoconf .. or just GNU automake.

Having generated files in the release tarball is a good practise, why should users have to install a bunch of extra tools just to get PDF of the manual or other non-system specific files? It is not just build scripts all over the place, installing TeX Live just to get a PDF manual of something is super annoying.

Writing your own ./configure that works remotely as something users would expect is non-trivial, and complicated -- we did that 30 years ago before GNU autoconf. There is a reason why we stopped doing that ...

I'd go so far to think that GNU autotools is the most sensible build system out there...