[shoover]

I have found the learning curve to be very steep. Extension points are several, subtle, and powerful, leveraging heavily not only normal OOP but also python meta programming. It is not out of the question go beyond all that and monkey patch some core class; I’ve seen this recommended by maintainers in some circumstances.

The docs are up front that waf is not a build system but a build system toolkit. For example, there is a demo that uses makefiles as the build language and runs them in waf. Another demo requires no build file but just finds the source files and builds them. But I have yet to see any external project released that says, “This is a build system... built on the waf build system toolkit,” like the Software Construction Toolkit was built on scons. Perhaps the toolkit is so close to being a build system that people just use it as is and require only small customizations, which are kept in their projects.