> Any portable build system, that already requires EVERY user to have that build system installed, is DoA for being a viable portable build system. I don't und

> Any portable build system, that already requires EVERY user to have that build system installed, is DoA for being a viable portable build system. I don't understand the argument, it seems very circular. Most software packages have a number of build dependencies as prerequisites for building, including a compiler, build tool like make/ninja, libraries and headers, other processors and tools like doxygen, sphinx, static analysis etc. What makes the "build system generator" so unique in its requirements that this one tool must be embedded in the source package? Nothing. It's a convention adopted by the GNU Autotools initially for pragmatic reasons--the requirement that the end user install m4, perl, and a few other tools, and that in the early days the breakage between autoconf and automake minor versions was routine and really annoying. Today you can just run "autoreconf -fvi" for the same effect, and many packages have stopped distributing the generated scripts. Many distributions regenerate them as a matter of course, making the distributed copies redundant. Today, when we have fully-described and automatic installation of build-dependencies on most platforms, the need for embedding no longer exists. I'm afraid that I don't buy your argument. Don't mistake historical conventions established for a single tool with a hard requirement. The requirement doesn't actually exist.