On Tue, Mar 24, 2026 at 4:03 AM Liviu Ionescu <[email protected]> wrote: > However, during the lifetime of large projects, there usually comes the time > when they must be upgraded to a more modern build system. > > As a user of both cmake and meson in parallel for my projects, my > advice would be to do the exercise for both tools, and only after getting > a reasonable level of understanding of both to decide on the less painful > for each specific project.
I am kind of neutral to all kinds of build systems. Just like I am kind of neutral to all kinds of operating systems. Just to provide some references from the projects I am heavily involved in. Surprisingly autotools can still be maintained for many years... A few examples 1) libusb project -- say not to CMake and stick to auto-tools. You can refer to the heated discussions here. https://github.com/libusb/libusb/pull/495 https://github.com/libusb/libusb/pull/1134 But then we have a "community maintained" libusb-cmake repo. https://github.com/libusb/libusb-cmake 2) hidapi project -- move to CMake, but keep autotools (deprecated) https://github.com/libusb/hidapi 3) avrdude -- move to CMake but keep autotools alive and updated https://github.com/avrdudes/avrdude -- Xiaofan
