consider moving to the waf build system

[victor]

Waf replaces the autotools chain: automake, make, etc... Since getting those right is a pain to say the least, replacing it has been a wish for me for a long time. Waf seems to be a good alternative. It's (only?) drawback is a dependency on Python 2.3, but I think we can assume that to be installed on most systems.

[matthijs]

Waf looks nice. Took me a few googles to find its homepage, so here it is:  http://code.google.com/p/waf/