My experience is that a lot of these projects are bluffing when they use autotools. Autotools will work very hard to make sure stdlib is there. But as soon as you compile on a more exotic system, none of the checks are of any use, and you fail in the make stage.

Maybe we should make any easy to use version of autotools which does nothing but accept the standard prefix, flags, etc options. You wouldn’t be able to do sophisticated configuration, but let’s face it most codes only pretend to do that.