Christian Holm Christensen wrote:
The build system of ROOT is horrible - I should know, I helped make it initially. Back when we did the build system, Autotools was really an option, for a verity of reasons. The foremost was (and still is), that Autotools (Libtool in particular) doesn't support MSVC well. Secondly, at that time, it was possible to make a non-recursive build system, and thirdly, the upstream developers wasn't that familiar with Autotools andit sort of looked too complicated for their taste.
I am not sure which libtool you've used, but I know that someone working on a project I'm involved with has, or is in the process of, adding msvc support to libtool - in fact it may even be in libtool cvs now.
Whether lots of support is required in the other autotools, I do not know. -- Neil