I use CMake, but can completely understand wanting to avoid it. The Makefiles that CMake produces are not at all what you want for correct reproducible builds.

I use CMake, but can completely understand wanting to avoid it. The Makefiles that CMake produces are not at all what you want for correct reproducible builds. * Before CMake 3.20, released in 2021, CMake tracked dependencies at configuration time. As a result, any time you add/remove a header file, you need to re-run CMake in order to have correct builds. CMake 3.20 finally delegated this out to the underlying compiler. * The Makefile produced by CMake does not have a target for the object file. Even though it prints out the path `CMakeFiles/cmake_target.dir/src/my_file.cc.o`, and generates that file, you cannot run `make CMakeFiles/cmake_target.dir/src/my_file.cc.o` from inside the build directory. Instead, you need to run `make src/my_file.cc.o`, a PHONY target which actually builds the object file. * Wildcard rules in CMake are expanded to static rules in Make, rather than wildcard rules. As a result, any time you add/remove a file, such as when checking out a new branch, you need to re-run CMake in order to have a correct build. * Until recently, the makefiles produced by CMake did give useful information with `make --dry-run`. Instead of printing the command required to compile a file, it instead printed an internal delegation back to cmake. * Non-transferable build. The `CMakeCache.txt` stores a record of what options have been enabled/disabled, but also has local file information. As a result, the contents of `CMakeCache.txt` are essential to know what I actually built, but I cannot send it to somebody else as a way to reproduce my build. Makefiles generally avoid this by having explicit include files, which then can be transferred. So, in order to have correct and reproducible builds, I need to re-run CMake every time I'm building a project, the usual tools for debugging a build error are broken, and including my build environment in a bug report is useless for reproduction. I can see why somebody would want to avoid it.