Attention young whipper-snappers fresh out of comp sci 101. Just because a thing is "old" does not mean it is bad. This should be obvious when you're making that argument at a 25 year old project.
Just had this exchange:
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User: PHP should replace autotools with CMake. (not committing to do the work)
Me: Why? What problem does it solve? Every third party extensions would have to be updated to reflect such a change.
User: autotools is old.
Me: 🙄