That is my experience as well. I have been using autotools-generated packages well over 20 years but thought it would be difficult to learn. Recently, I got th

That is my experience as well. I have been using autotools-generated packages well over 20 years but thought it would be difficult to learn. Recently, I got the job of supporting dozens of packages in an organizational environment. The first choice was cmake with Conan, but I found both to be quite ambiguous defined and it was really hard to figure out what was going on and how to get things to build. Then I found the autotools tutorials I linked before, and I needed less than one day to get going with autotools - and I find the build scripts easy to debug. I think this is a larger issue with CMake - it has a lot of magic going on, but always leaving the user with fuzzy definitions and a really unclear concept of what is going on. And while I like the kind of magic which happens inside Emacs, for example, when it does just the right thing when I move the cursor around, I had this kind if magic which leaves me wondering what is going on and unable to fix issues based on systematic knowledge. I find it really, really time-consuming to work with such systems.