autogen.sh
autogen.sh is nothing new: people write a custom one for every Autotools-based
project they work on, unless they use autoreconf and that actually works. I
found myself within this set when I stumbled upon project
buildconf on SourceForge. What
Sean Morrison is working on there is a universal one-file tool to save people
from writing these custom almost-identical bootstrap scripts — a universal
autogen.sh script. He did a good job: for instance, recursive configures are
handled correctly. Technically it's a wrapper around autoreconf but also a
replacement where autoreconf is missing. So I gave it a try on my own
Autotools based projects. The only thing I missed was downloading of a
bleeding-edge config.guess file from
GNUlib that I started shipping with releases to better support
Haiku. So I communicated with Sean and started adding this feature to the
script. Sean improved and extended my patch and started using the end-result
with BRL-CAD. The current state is in use at three
different places now
and will probably make a new buildconf release after some more testing. If you run an Autotools-based project I'd be interested to hear if buildconf works for you.