Add to Chrome
Add to Edge
Add to Firefox
Add to Opera
Add to Brave
Add to SafariSet of GNU tools that are known as the "Autotools".
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro Based on standard tools
It's a standard tool built over standard tools.
Pro Ubiquitous
It's a well established build system that is ubiquitous in the open source world.
Pro make distcheck
Build your project, run the tests, create a release tarball, unpack it with read-only sources, build it and run the tests. This should be the minimum standard for every build system, yet it seems hard to reach.
Pro Basic API for building anything: ./configure; make
The skills you learn for building one language still work when you build something else, even down to creating books for print from emacs org-mode.
Cons
Con Perl
Autoconf is dependent on Perl.
Con Autotools is far too complicated
It seems to add far too much complexity to projects. The build system has a tendency to be more complex than the actual projects that it's being used to build.
Con Poor documentation
In spite of its many years of existence, the available documentation leaves much to be desired.
Commonly Compared
