Properly done autoconf is very developer-friendly for building but if you have to maintain it, it can be a nightmare.
OTOH, because you can always escape to shell scripts, I usually can fix any issue that crops up.
With cmake, I regularly fail, e.g. configuring succeeds but building fails because of a missing library and because I actually have no clue what the standard approach should be (online documentation is abysmal with cmake).
Properly done autoconf is very developer-friendly for building but if you have to maintain it, it can be a nightmare.
OTOH, because you can always escape to shell scripts, I usually can fix any issue that crops up.
With cmake, I regularly fail, e.g. configuring succeeds but building fails because of a missing library and because I actually have no clue what the standard approach should be (online documentation is abysmal with cmake).