The problem with generated Makefiles is that you start to debug the generation step, if possible, if you want to tweak things, whereas a Makefile written by a h

The problem with generated Makefiles is that you start to debug the generation step, if possible, if you want to tweak things, whereas a Makefile written by a human is usually easy to edit. Alternatively the generated Makefile could use overrides from an optional .mk file to be sourced, but that's not what I've seen with automake or cmake.