Being dissatisfied with the complexity and size of the GNU autoconf suite (half a meg of a script for a 10k project is a little too much) we have developed our own replacement. It consists of a Makedefs.include, which defines rules for building executables, shared or static libraries and docbooks, and a configure.in script that detects executables, libraries, headers and functions. Both scripts need to be included by a top-level GNUmakefile or configure script which are failry trivial to understand and compose after looking at, say, parabellym for an example.

Makedefs works with modern BSD and Linux systems, Darwin and MinGW. Other POSIX systems should also present no problems.

Distributed under the BSD license.