Why not using autotools

I believe autotools is the wrong designed and poor implementation, partly trying to solve the wrong problem. The fix for this is a better design. For example scconfig - which is the system that configures libmawk. It can do everything it needs to do (yes, including cross compilation).

Mawk generally dosn't require too many special things and should compile fine on POSIX systems. If it doesn't compile for you, you have the following choices:

1. you can contact me, report bugs, so I can fix scconfig
2. you can bypass scconfig and manually create Makefile.conf and conf.h for your system yourself (won't help much in fixing scconfig, tho)
3. you can create and maintain your own autotools version (but official libmawk will not include support for autotools)