> Or all the projects must be ported to use a particular build system (like CMake exported config packages). They really don't. I mean, it's a nice to have but

> Or all the projects must be ported to use a particular build system (like CMake exported config packages). They really don't. I mean, it's a nice to have but not a must have. If you want to use a project that doesn't offer Cmake support then all you need to do is, say, add a find-<projectname>.Cmake file which pretty much just calls find_library and sets a couple of variables, stash it in your project tree under ~/Cmake, add that path to your Cmake modules path and you're all set. I mean, in all this can be done for each package with less than a dozen lines of code, total. I'd say not bad.