[ahartmetz]

Their idiosyncrasies may look similar, but CMake has a much stronger skeleton of core algorithms and data structures for a build system than Bitbake. Specifically, as I mentioned in another reply, Bitbake does not model dependencies correctly. CMake does.

[nrclark]

Can you elaborate a bit on the dependency-handling topic? I've always thought that Bitbake's dependency handling worked pretty well. It only has package-level granularity, but is quite good within that context.

[ahartmetz]

As of five years ago when I last used it:

Bitbake doesn't model all changes that affect packages, so after certain changes, some packages that should be rebuilt, aren't. It is especially prone to happen when changing Bitbake variables (example: MACHINE_FEATURES), and these are a quite common way to change things about the image being built.