Almost forgot to mention this. I had “move PWman from Autoconf to a simple Makefile” on my “someday” list, thinking it would be pretty tricky to do, but actually it wasn’t too hard:

  1. Remove all the AutoHell junk. There was a lot of it!
  2. Move src and doc files to the top directory. Not strictly required, but tidies things up a bit.
  3. Add a Makefile, config.mk and config.h. The combination of config.mk with a Makefile approach is in a suckless style; the config.mk is what allows ease of portability. For the time being I’ve not reduced the config.h file down from what autoconf produced. The Makefile itself I based on an existing suckless one.

And that was pretty much it apart from a small tweak to add in a required reference and being able to delete an entire file after the fact that it wasn’t actually used was no longer hidden by Autoconf.

Why on earth did anyone use Autoconf?