I'd just like to suggest that in the event of future significant development on a new automake, or a revamped build system in whatever way, that the new system not be called "autoconf" or "automake". It seems inevitable to me that any such new system would have incompatibilities with the old, and this would cause trouble both for the new developers (retaining perfect compatibility is hard and ugly, thus typically does not happen), and existing users (their long-time build scripts would be broken).(*) It would surely be nice for a new system to be "as compatible as possible" with the old, but pretending it is a drop-in replacement seems like it would just lead to bad feelings all around. --best, karl. (*) This already happened with autoconf 2.70, unfortunately. Even the minor incompatibilities it introduced are a significant barrier for some of us (at least me) to adoption. The kinds of rewrites being talked about here would surely have far more compatibility issues.