It's not that it can't be done, it's that the community went in a different direction, and there's a strong cultural bias. Bell Labs internally had a "new make"

It's not that it can't be done, it's that the community went in a different direction, and there's a strong cultural bias. Bell Labs internally had a "new make" written by Glenn Fowler, that went full bore into tracking dependencies, probing local and global resources, recording configuration state at build time, that we adopted in Graphviz. It was powerful and concise. It was also a heroic effort for Glenn to maintain and develop, though others were assigned. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/6771042 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/6771042 At one point in our project we had a lot of arguments about build systems and software repositories (there were times when we had to stop talking about it), then at some point John Ellson said, look, everyone else is using autotools, so do you want them to use your software? We realized he was right. Individuals in the software community are capable of building a lot of amazing tools. The difficulty is persuading the community and teaching non-specialists to use them. They already know how to run make, or ./autogen.sh; ./configure --prefix=$HOME Despite this Graphviz still has 3 or 4 build systems: autotools, Visual Studio (probably 90% of our audience is on Windows though we try not to think about it), Xcode (needed for an under-maintained MacOS app), and Magnus Jacobsson and Matthew Fernandez have a lot of a Cmake build working, though not yet complete. Apologies for rambling a little off topic.