When comparing Rake vs Autotools, the Slant community recommends Autotools for most people. In the question“What are the best open-source build systems for C/C++?” Autotools is ranked 18th while Rake is ranked 19th. The most important reason people chose Autotools is:
It's a standard tool built over standard tools.
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Powerful language
You can write code for your build system in Ruby. While not my choice for general programming, Ruby is powerful and expressive. Given some knowledge of Ruby, you can create powerful Rake extensions that result in your average target only needing a few lines in the rakefile in spite of having complex behaviors (Is the library for public consumption, or only for use within the current repo/tier? Compile certain files on certain platforms? Link to libraries published from other repos? etc.).
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 Slooooow
For large codebases or with complex extensions, Rake can become quite slow. I'm aware of one codebase on which it can take 15 minutes to determine that no changes have been made and no recompilation is necessary.
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.