Cmake won against the incumbent, which was autotools. Still it's still far from being an enjoyable tool, whose experience is made even worse by its god-awful docs.
As user, I find the experience with autotools to be much nicer as well. For whatever reason, the interface just seems more intuitive. I mean, ./configure --help will tell you basically all you need to know. An underappreciated bonus is that you don't have to install more stuff just to __build__ some program you might not even want. I've run into more than one project that required a specific version of cmake, which as luck would have it, was not the version packaged with my distro. This leaves you either building another cmake first or finding a tool/library that isn't so persnickety.
Given the choice between trying a project that uses CMake or or autools, I'll choose the autotools based project every time.
sorry what ? I remember hours in my younger years searching which Debian package provided autowhateverflavoroftheday.sh so that I could build $random internet project
> sorry what ? I remember hours in my younger years searching which Debian package provided autowhateverflavoroftheday.sh so that I could build $random internet project
The whole point of Autotools is that distributed source packages can be built by themselves, without requiring any part of Autotools to be installed. They build even on obscure systems that don't have any working version of Autotools.
If you have to install autoanything to build a random project that uses Autotools, either you are doing something wrong, or the project is using Autotools wrong, or maybe the Debian package is using Autotools wrong.
That said, I know what you mean. I've had to seek out a number of different versions of Autotools just to get some things to build. But that is because a lot of projects and/or distro packaging blatantly uses Autotools differently than it's was designed to be used. I don't think Autotools should be blamed for this.
yes, it absolutely should be. If a tool is misused, it's generally because it's hard to use correctly. In contrast, if I see a repo with a CMakeLists.txt I know that it's going to be a simple cmake && make.
Citation needed.
Tools get misused all the time. If I use a flat bladed screw driver as a pry bar/chisel/whatever, that doesn't mean the flat bladed screw driver is hard to use.
(I don't know what build system I'd pick these days - probably just write the Makefiles by hand.)