Comment by bluGill
10 hours ago
For simple projects. Make is easier for simple things I will grant. However when your projects gets complex at all make becomes a real pain and cmake becomes much easier.
Cmake has a lot of warts, but they have also put a lot of effort into finding and fixing all those weird special cases. If your project uses CMake odds are high it will build anywhere.
Also, for better or worse, cmake is pretty much the "standard" for C/C++ these days.
Fighting the standard often creates it's own set of problems and nightmares that just aren't worth it. Especially true in C++ where yhou often have to integrate with other projects and their build systems. Way easier if you just use cmake like everyone else.
Even the old hold outs, boost and google open source, now use cmake for their open source stuff.
Odds are high the distro maintainer will lose hair trying to package it