I prefer autotools to CMake. Maybe I didn't really give CMake a fair shot, but in a few hours of trying, I couldn't out figure out the CMake equivalent to a bit of custom glue code in configure.ac that checked for a Lisp compiler.

I get the feeling CMake works fine as long as you color within the lines, but that it's much harder to extend than autotools is.

Yes, this is something I have thought through, though I may have been lucky/unlucky with my pick of projects. But generally speaking, installs I have installed based on GNU autotools, seems to install with less fuzz than those with C-Make. So, that, and the fact that there is full free documentation of GNU Autotools, even books out there, have made my personal choice easy.

For me the overall factor is the ease for any of my users, installing something I have written.

Using a macro language was already bad in the 90ies (autoconf/automake using m4), but using one in 2000 is just tragic.

It is also impossible to debug, partly because of the abomination the cmake language is: even understanding where a variable is defined is hard, and because the language is so unexpressive, the Find*.cmake modules are often in the 1000s lines count.

For all its suckiness, I take autoconf/automake over cmake.

I have never been able to figure out how to cross-compile a project that uses CMake. GNU Make lets you just set some environment flags and drop in a different compiler.