I always think CMake is so simple, there's nothing to it. It is maybe awkward to write compared to python or whatever, and kinda ugly, but it is very easy to le

I always think CMake is so simple, there's nothing to it. It is maybe awkward to write compared to python or whatever, and kinda ugly, but it is very easy to learn, you can do anything with it (eventually), multiplatform, and has several back-ends, like make, ninja or IDEs. The issue you linked to was changing the environment after running the "configure" step, but the availability of the header that had been newly installed was cached to "not available", so re-running cmake used the cached "not available" instead of checking the system again. Or something like that. Seems like a classic trade off of speed vs correctness. Something like SCons would always check everything and ran super slow, whereas CMake opts for not checking things that are less likely to change and caching the result. That shouldn't be used as a reason to throw away all the other good stuff CMake has :-)