I don't disagree that the CMake language is badly misguided. I think that the SCons approach of just writing Python is sensible rather then inventing a whole new scripting language as well as a build system.
But CMake probably will get you a program that compiles cross-platform within an hour or two, even for a novice. Autotools probably won't do that for you.
SCons is utterly horrible. It isn’t a build system so much as a “Build your own build system” system. It gives you absolutely nothing to manage dependencies or shared information, or cross-platform ways of handling compiler features.
As such, everything using it is it’s own unique system completely alien and not interoperable with anything else.
And being python seems to lead to people embedding parts of their application as part of the build system, so now that is intertwined also.
I will run a million miles if I ever see a project using SCons, CMake is infinitely nicer, and makes some sense but I agree with further up the thread that it needs a new, saner language that maps over the top (expressions would be a start).
Hm. We had a SCons based build system around ten years back where we ran 10 different C++ compilers/toolchains for multiple native and cross build targets without any problems. Yes, we had to write some stuff on top of it, but after some systematic design, it went really smoothly.
