A former colleague of mine, told me many times :"Avoid to deal with autotools whenever you can"... And I should have listened to him more carefully.

On the contrary, I've just wrote a patch to achieve the i18n of pitivi, a video editor that we've seen a demonstration at the Guadec. And as you can easily imagine, this tool uses autoconf, automake... to be built...

Well I managed to do with it (thanks to Edward the maintener and the main developer of the tool), and it is a good experience...

But right now, follow my advice : "Avoid to deal with autotools whenever you can" :-)