Neal Gompa wrote:
And in CMake's favor, there's a huge ecosystem of helpers
and
integrations that make it easier for people to understand what CMake
is doing as it's being developed, built, and shipped. That makes it
much more attractive than Autotools simply because the knowledge and
the tooling is there for developers and users to dig into it.
Well, to be fair, I have also seen (more than once!) arcane stuff being done
in CMake, with almost a whole new build system being built on top of CMake
(tons of custom macros implementing things such as bundled libraries, before
CMake had native support for that), which was not particularly easy to
understand either.
If you use CMake the way it was intended, a CMakeLists.txt is a lot more
readable than even a configure.ac and Makefile.am, let alone the generated
blobs autoconf spits out based on those. But there is potential for abuse,
too.
That said, I do not believe completely banning custom functions and macros
as Meson does is a workable solution.
Kevin Kofler