I'm a very frequent user of the GNU Autotools (mostly Autoconf, occasionally Libtool). I'm working on a project where portability is going to be a sticking point.. Yet, the rest of the team is just not comfortable working with m4. I got this in my inbox from not one, but four people:
Anyway, perhaps someone could recommend something Python or PHP based? I'm working on the C end of a much larger tree; I can be sure either Python or PHP 5 will be present, as they are prerequisites.
For building C/C++ software from ANT or maven you might be interested in terp. It includes a portable C++ compiler task that works with many C++ compilers on many platforms.
I have heard good things about CMake which tries to solve the same problems. Here is the wikipedia article
One more auto* replacement - mk-configure. Docs can be found here