In my opinion, automake is the weakest part of the autotools chain. Look at this section of the manual for example https://www.gnu.org/software/automake/manual

In my opinion, automake is the weakest part of the autotools chain. Look at this section of the manual for example https://www.gnu.org/software/automake/manual/automake.html#General-Operation https://www.gnu.org/software/automake/manual/automake.html#G...: it says that automake doesn't recognize many Gnu Make extension, and can get confused even by weird whitespace...