[realharo]

Does qmake deal with finding the dependencies and automatically adding the include paths, libraries, etc. for them?

As far as I know, you need to stick the compiler and linker flags manually into qmake, which basically means that it works on your machine, but may break on anyone else's system. This is what a lot of the complexity inside cmake is addressing - differences in build environments.

[e12e]

I think the answer is: "It depends.". From some searching, it looks like cmake has better cross-platform support, and is (unsurprisingly) more powerful when you need to do something a little gnarly. That said, it appears (never had need to test) that qmake works fine with pkg-config:

http://doc.qt.io/qt-5/qmake-project-files.html

In my experience (mostly from compiling from upstream source, when something isn't available in Debian and/or backporting for personal use) there are different kind of libraries, some behave better than others (eg: easy to install under $HOME/opt with xstow -- as I prefer to /usr/local, as the latter needs root and/or rw-privileges on /usr/local). I've yet to find any pattern for when things just work, and when things don't (the real reason typically being some hard-coded paths or other nastiness -- I just mean some obscure projects work fine, some big ones fail miserably). So I guess YMMV -- but for now, qmake is the tool for building simple c++ I've found that is simple, for simple projects. I also use CMake (preferably with ninja) -- but I don't really like the CMake "language". Maybe what we need is a CMake-generator? Then we can generate CMake-files that generate ninja files that build our code! ;-)