[jwilk]

> Current unstable Build-Depends is 1999 (CMake), 1544 (Autotools), 395 (Meson)

These days pretty much everything build-depends indirectly on autotools, via debhelper → dh-autoreconf → autoconf.

These numbers are probably more meaningful:

  $ wget -q https://deb.debian.org/debian/dists/unstable/main/Contents-source.gz

  $ zgrep -E $'(^|/)configure[.](in|ac)\t' Contents-source.gz | cut -f 2 | tr ',' '\n' | sort -u | wc -l
  5562

  $ zgrep -E $'(^|/)CMakeLists[.]txt\t' Contents-source.gz | cut -f 2 | tr ',' '\n' | sort -u | wc -l
  2455

  $ zgrep -E $'(^|/)meson[.]build\t' Contents-source.gz | cut -f 2 | tr ',' '\n' | sort -u | wc -l
  466