> [...] I have experience with CMake (I find it a vast improvement > over auto-tools for package / feature detection, but a hot mess for > about anything else), GN/Ninja (very powerful, but essentially > requires too much dependencies to get the most out of it) and Bazel > (can be hard to get into, very powerful, but requirements are a bit > crazy at the moment). I'm curious about Meson.
I still favor autotools over cmake. Especially the syntax of the latter makes me cringe :-) On the other hand, we *do* have contributed cmake support and some reports both for bugs and improvments in the bug tracker for it. And I haven't tried ninja or mason; this is lazyness on my side since I'm not involved in any project that uses those build systems. Whatever we do, I strongly believe that the build system using autotools must stay. Maybe we can enhance it by using automake... Note that improvement of FreeType's build system is also a potential GSoC project (see https://www.freetype.org/gsoc.html); this year there was no proposal for that, however. Werner
