It's also kind of amazing how terrible most of the replacements people developed are. Some are significntly worse than autotools, which is no mean feat.
I blame make's awful syntax.
I blame make's awful syntax.
I hate using autotools, but every time I touch a project that uses something else (and that is too complex for a ten-line Makefile), I inevitably end up wishing that it used autotools. I suppose it shows that sometimes a few decades of polishing a turd does sort of work.
I don't think there will ever be a standard build tool, simply shunts to get the needed functionality from others. Eventually all build tools will exist in each other and the only interface will be recursion.
I especially like that one file allows me to develop on XCode, somebody else on Visual Studio and finally deploy on Linux/gcc. One config file creates native projects on all 3 platforms, no manual hacking.
Makefiles work fine in the trivial case, the problem is that things quickly become complex. Automating that complexity seems like it should be easy but, as it turns out, it isn't.
There should be a way to $FOO. Well, there's a way to do it in a Makefile but figuring that out is harder than should be, and doesn't make sense when you finally do figure it out.
"Well that way is stupid. Here's how I'd do it:"
I like cmake, and used to use it exclusively, but after running into so many issues with their homebrew scripting/configuration language, I've mostly moved on. I wouldn't be surprised if I end up coming back, and I'd encourage everybody to give it a shot (the ease of typical simple Makefile generation, but with extra muscle), but the omission of Tcl as a control/config tool has always baffled me.
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CMake#History
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insight_Segmentation_and_Registration_Toolkit