Foreword
Do you remember the 1980s? Veteran users of free software on Unix could testify that although there were a lot of programs distributed as source code back then (over USENET), there was not a lot of consistency in how to compile and install them. The more complicated a package was, the more likely it was to have its own unique build procedure that had to be learned first. And there were no widely used approaches to portability problems. Each software author handled them in a different way, if they did at all.
Fast forward to the present. A de facto standard is in widespread use for solving those problems, and it is not just free software packages that are using it; some proprietary programs from the largest computer companies are built ...
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