I'm building tons of projects at once, and while they're being built, I'd like to do other stuff on the same machine, while being able to monitor the progress.
Is there a way to fetch current progress from configure script as generated by autoconf, and from Makefile generated by autotools?
The short answer is probably "no". But, it depends on what sort of monitoring you want. If you just want to be alerted when each step is finished, you can easily just run:
$ configure && alert-me && make && alert-me
where alert-me is some script that sends you the alert. As a concrete example, if you are using gnu-screen, you could set up monitoring for a window, then run
$ configure > config.output && echo done
When configure is done, the echo will trigger an alert on all the other windows.
If you will be doing this multiple times with each package, you could record the number of lines of output from a run of configure, and get a percentage progress report of the current run by comparing the lines of output. (That seems like a hassle.)
