I agree 100% with almost everything you say. Regarding "a)", can you point me to a distro where after installing a library "libfoo" from the standard packaging

I agree 100% with almost everything you say. Regarding "a)", can you point me to a distro where after installing a library "libfoo" from the standard packaging system, the C compiler fails to find "foo.h" and the linker fails to work with "-lfoo" ? I've never found such bizarre behavior. Regarding "b)", granted. Portability to microsoft compilers is a bitch, and may as well require cmake. Regarding "c)", this is an impossible problem. If you install a library on ~/my/particular/path/to/libfoo, and you want to compile against this, then of course you will have to specify that particular path manually inside the compilation system. This is possible with cmake, and there's even a beautiful user interface for that. It is just as easy with plain makefiles: you just add the particular path to the C_INCLUDE_PATH and LIBRARY_PATH variables (they work exactly as PATH). No need to mess with -I nor -L. Notice that here you are not using any of the cmake "detection" capabilities, you are just specifying the path manually. This is correct behavior, of course you would not like cmake to spy on its own inside your home dir to see if it can find a certain dependency. > You may wish for a situation where libraries can just be specified easily and consistently Yes I do. And I'm very happy that this is the case. > but the reality for C++ is incredibly messy thanks to autotools, cmake, and other tools written by people who do not understand the concept of PATH. The reality is easy, not messy, it's just people who make it messy intentionally; more out of ignorance, not of malice. Look for example at the imagemagick "detection" rules shown by the OP as a pinnacle of useful and complicated thing that cmake does. It is completely unnecessary bullshit! If imagemagick is installed, then these executables are already on your PATH, and they are found automatically by the shell (that's exactly its job!). If imagemagick is not installed, or if it is installed on a secret directory, then there's no reasonable hope for cmake to "detect" it (other than scanning the whole disk, which I hope it does not try to do...); and if you want to use this secret installation of imagemagick you will have to specify its path manually somewhere in the compilation system. For example, by setting a PATH variable inside your code. Everything that you say is right, and it reinforces my conviction that "detecting" installed libraries never needs to be done. Yet you have hordes of idiots writing detection rules for cmake. What a time to be alive.