and in order to ship this package to deb, deploy to different platform, use autotools to test C features is a requirement. (we used to build the project with cmake before we use autotools)
I too reliably avoid libraries that depend on these old bloated tools (although I appreciate its helpful for packaging; the script complexity and lack of portability is undeniably a trade off cost in using automake; the usefulness of this library for me would be for a static embedded use case, where automake is of questionable value)
to use it for a static embedded use case, you may write your own build script to compile the library (it's not hard to write one). the cflags are describe in src/Makefile.am
and you can use pkg-config to list the flags you need.