if you like autotools we definitely aren't going to be friends
this is because autotools gives you the sort of brain damage that makes you look at some of the most atrocious interfaces in existence and go "This is good actually. I will go and argue with strangers about how good my dogshit collection of generated shell scripts is" instead of building anything that improves people's lives rather than worsening them
anyway I hate autotools and if you try to convince me that autotools are good I will probably hate you, too
people think I like cmake because I hate autotools. nothing could be further from truth. cmake is a barely-functioning pile of atrocious C++ that includes what is probably the second-worst interface of a build system. however, my hatred for autotools far eclipses my desire to never interact with cmake again, to the point where I ended up becoming a cmake expert against my wish and desire

@whitequark we discovered today that the link command for an executable or lib ends up in a link.txt file called from a submakefile via a cmake_link tool or something, and that RM is actually cmake --rm

Also, they recently changed (deb12->deb13) the CMAKE_C_CREATE_STATIC_LIBRARY command from ar rc to ar qc and that it broke our build of a native ios library, the latest xcode choked on the generated .a files. Fuck that shit.

@f4grx the link.txt thing is to avoid length limits on command line arguments (present in both Windows and Linux, though Linux has a much bigger limit)

the cmake --rm is so you can use it on Windows transparently (there's also cmake -E copy and friends, very useful)

@whitequark @f4grx that's half of the shit in CMake: working around platform stupid shit. The other half is self inflicted problems (mainly that buildsystem are not a soup of variables). You might think there's a third half and that it is the CMake language. But that would be nice to shit to compare the CMake language with it. No that language is hell, it is trap after trap.
@whitequark @f4grx but despite this I'm working on adding Rust support to CMake. Don't ask why please.
@amdg2 @whitequark oh yes that would make me try rust, because I refuse to learn more build systems.