and then they wrapped it another layer of translation, and then another and I think more. and things started breaking because I needed the right version of autotools, and at some point I started just running "cc *.c -I. -o foo" before even starting to try to use configure, and it usually worked and saved me a lot of screwing around.
its certainly settled down some, but only because everything is really linux. but still we're here more than 30 years later checking for socklen_t.
it was a always a bad plan.
The person you’re replying to did not say the build host has to be portable. They said that the software configuration script needed to be portable:
> And [for `configure`] to be portable to such systems you needed to check everything.
Edit:
> Why not choose a single platform for your CI and build for all of your targets on those using a compatibility library to cover up differences.
You can. Nothing precludes you from doing this. But there are situations where you control neither the build environment nor the install environment.
tar x
cd <source dir>
./configure <options>
make
make install
make clean