Hello Charles,

it was indeed the intention to change the build process of the core
libndarray to use autoconf.  I've tested it on Linux, Mac, Solaris, and
it works very well.  libndarray is really a separate project, which only
resides for current development inside the numpy project.  The point
is that you can build libndarray without having a particular Python
installed.  The hope is that libndarray becomes used by other projects
which are not Python based, for example:
 * a pure C program
 * a Perl C extension
 * a Ruby C extension

I thought that autoconf was the obvious choice for doing this, and also
that is cleaner than numpy.distutils.