It is nice and clean. Additionally, it makes creating a FreeBSD port dead-simple:
https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd-ports/blob/main/security/diffcode/Makefile
The line that causes it to be built and packaged purrfectly for insertion into the FreeBSD Ports repos is line 12, "USES = cmake". No other magic is needed. A lot of Makefile-based projects have moar complercated ports because the locations of the output files varies widely.
If it were up to me, the entire build system would be using CMake.
That does look nice and clean.
My objective wasn't to stop using Make, but to stop using the GNU Autotools stuff. Those tools are built to handle all sorts of obscure edge cases that don't exist anymore. There just isn't that much variation in our target platforms anymore, so a few simple tests are all we need. As long as it builds on BSD and Linux, I'm fine with it; we no longer have to check for oddball systems with oddball libraries because no one is running Citadel on those systems anymore (and we don't have enough developer time to support them anyway).
I probably reinvented a wheel somewhere ... but it was a very basic, very simple wheel.
All of the usual criticisms of Richard Marx Stallman are included herein by reference.
