[dmm]

cmake is very nice. I used it in my last big c++ project. The cmake language is ugly but I think it's a law or something that build tools use ugly languages.

One advantage of autotools is that it distributes everything as a portable shell script, so the user doesn't have to have a autoconf, etc installed. That was an advantage when giving tarballs to users to run on crazy cluster environments, for example. Anything that calls itself unix has to have a bourne shell. Oh well probably not that big of an advantage these days.

I was really complaining more about dunno-works-on-ubuntu GNUMakefiles and 90s scripting languages extention builds.

[scrollaway]

I agree, the CMake language is needlessly different and ugly. But it's readable and usable which matters a lot more.

I heard there's movement inside the CMake community to move to lua as a language, which would be awesome.