My point was that autotools had the excuse of being written in the early 90ies, cmake doesn't. Your experience with debugging autotools vs cmake does not match

My point was that autotools had the excuse of being written in the early 90ies, cmake doesn't. Your experience with debugging autotools vs cmake does not match mine: cmake is not an improvement over autotools (if only because at least with autotools, there is some decent doc out there and google knows a lot about autoconf insanity). It took me hours to debug trivial issues with cmake, because you can't easily trace where variables are defined.