Before I started writing software, my main experience with build systems was trying to build a program I wanted that wasn't inside apt. When you're in that posi

Before I started writing software, my main experience with build systems was trying to build a program I wanted that wasn't inside apt. When you're in that position, autotools is much nicer. The paradigm of downloading a release tarball with configure script (which has a --help!), so the end user just needs to do the old ./configure && make && sudo make install is really nice. I found it much easier to tell autotools how to find a library. Autotools made it intuitive to figure out what options were available (configure --help), and I never ran into trouble with my cmake version being too old. But as a developer in c++ land, I much prefer cmake. It integrates very nicely with nearly all other c++ libraries out there. I think modern cmake targets do a nice job of encapsulating how to consume a dependency. And Cmake isn't restricted to only POSIX like platforms. So I suppose it depends on who the target audience is.