My point is that "find_package(OpenCV 3.0 REQUIRED)" is a whole lot simpler to remember than whatever the equivalent shell commands are to enforce the minimum v

My point is that "find_package(OpenCV 3.0 REQUIRED)" is a whole lot simpler to remember than whatever the equivalent shell commands are to enforce the minimum version of a library. What you are suggesting is to build the exact version for use with this specific project, different from "Developer I checked your environment and your version is too low". I'm just speaking from my experience, if you are very experienced with shell and can reproduce this type of behavior more quickly then more power to you. This is a similar debate to "why rewrite standard libraries in every project", for example, to count items in a list in python I can loop through and modify counts in a dict or I can use "collections.Counter(list_)" and it does it for me. Cmake provides ample standardized methods for C++ builds that I don't have to rewrite over and over again for every project.