David Haller <gen...@dhaller.de> wrote: > autotools is _by far_the best both from a users and a packagers view.
I do not agree. Its main advantage is that it is compatible with most existing unix systems (but I am already not so sure whether this also holds if you also want to compile for windows, powerpc, etc.) > cmake [...] qmake I agree, these are horrible. The best build system currently appears to be meson. > equivalent to "./configure --help" For meson, it is "cat meson_options.txt", and there is a clear distinction between general options and project specific ones. > transparent and easily hackable Hacking autotools is a nightmare: Things are often hidden in subprojects, sometimes combined with project specific hacks, generating/updating necessary configure files somewhere within the projects tree etc. And after each change you have to run autoreconf, often with compatibility problems of autoconf/automake/gettext/... versions etc. With meson, there is an absolutely strict separation between the distributed files and the generated/output files which are always in a fresh dir (and thus are _always_ produced). When hacking up, you need to modify only the *.meson files and do not have to worry about re-generating any other data. This sounds like I am a meson fanboy. I am not; actually, I dislike a lot of its design decisions. But compared to autotools, cmake, and qmake, it did a lot of things right.
