I'll probably get some flack for this, but I'd like to put in a plug for autotools (if you don't need to target Windows). Autotools has really come a long way

I'll probably get some flack for this, but I'd like to put in a plug for autotools (if you don't need to target Windows). Autotools has really come a long way since the bad old days back in the early 2000s. It's got some crusty corner cases, but I like it more and more as I use it. With CMake, everything seems like it's easy to bury yourself in custom macros. And before you know it, you have a build system that's complex, hard to debug, and impossible to re-target. Scons is similar (although at least you can step through the code in Python). I'd encourage anybody to try it out. At least, if your codebase is C or C++ and you don't need to target Windows.