If his replacement build system lets me a) build varnish under SUA on a version of windows that didn't even exist when he wrote the project b) cross-compile varnish for arm, then I'll agree with him. The "standard" gnu autoconf layout, for all its m4 insanity, gets you both those, and none of the various wheel-reinventions I've seen do.

Yes they're a pain in the ass, but a necessary one. `uname -s` obviously doesn't cater for the divergences and bugs within a platform.

Have a look at gnulib for things one has to deal with. BTW, one can just use gnulib and forget about lots of portability issues

Some interesting discussion in the previous submission (18 months ago): http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1499738