Richard: The problem with all these build systems is that they’re all scripting-based, which has the same downsides as automake and autoconf. Yes, the syntax of the languages might be nicer and easier to deal with — I’ll take python over m4 any day — but they’re essentially non-deterministic. IDEs can’t easily autogenerate them and they can’t parse ones that have been edited by hand.

On the other hand, while a build system with some well-defined rules and a fairly strict grammar might be easier to handle with tools, there are always corner cases needed by projects that wouldn’t be possible with such a system.

Dan looked at using cmake for Beagle to learn a bit about it at the GNOME hackfest, but it would need a lot of work for GNOME.