It also hides stuff so users look at simple, colourful lines with progress indicators instead of naked, overwhelming calls to the compiler. That said, as a use

It also hides stuff so users look at simple, colourful lines with progress indicators instead of naked, overwhelming calls to the compiler. That said, as a user I prefer autoconf. The semantics of --with-foo or --enable-bar are simple and well documented. And ./configure --help shows all the possibilities. Faffing around with -DCMAKE_STUFF is horrible. Ccmake should be nice but in practice never works properly. As a developer, both autoconf and cmake are horrifying and a huge time sink to get them to behave.