Autotools

I made a bunch of headway on this.  Turns out, things have changed a LOT since I last used autotools...mostly for the better, but it was a lot of relearning.  I made a branch for it because there are some issues:

1) It's problematic on macos 10.6/xcode3 because it includes very old versions of a bunch of required packages (autoconf, automake, cairo, and some dependencies of those).  It can be made to work with enough mucking with homebrew and PATH and PKG_CONFIG_PATH, but it's a pain.  Works pretty much out of the box in 10.8 though, once you install the dependencies from homebrew.
2) I haven't quite figured out which files generated by autoconf/automake to check into git (and by extension, include in the tarball).  There should at least be a configure script, so that end users won't need autoconf or automake installed.
3) I haven't tried this on Linux yet.  I should get to it this weekend.

Instructions:
1) autoreconf --install
2) ./configure <configure options>
3) make
4) make test
5) make install

The good news:  The tests hang in exactly the same spot on my computer as it did before I started mucking around with the build system.  :)  Take a look and let me know what you think.  I'll probably write a homebrew recipe as well if this gets merged.