cmake

We wanted to ensure the library is attractive to outside developers, hence CMake and other choices (like not having any dependencies).

CMake works well if you're building typical user space applications or libraries with dependencies to popular and typical libraries that CMake can find or follow typical conventions.

For larger projects, cmake can also theoretically generate a configuration for ninja (faster than make) only changing the command line.

CMake, for example, is less arcane, and can also generate project files for visual studio.

Having spent moderate to significant time with bjam, waf, qmake, make and cmake, I more or less settled on cmake because: A.

The only downside seems to be that the cmake language is ugly and limited.

My search for the answer later turned up the SO question and answer plus the new correct answer from the cmake site.

It's true, but it has the benefit that your makefiles are now complient with every other cmake users makefiles, and not special snowflakes.

In the process, I wrote thousands of lines of complicated cmake macros to interface with the packaging system, etc.

It just seems that CMake exposes it as well for make than for ninja I guess.

You are saying CMake is bad with gmake but good with ninja?

CMake generates makefiles, at least as I have used it, so you need to understand makefiles to debug any build problems.

I was playing around with this idea [0], much to the dismay of colleagues, until I discovered that CMake's ExternalProject module could do everything my "package manager" could do.