There are already many standard build specification formats: CMake, autotools, Meson. For each, most distro's package managers can build the software with very little configuration, e.g. Debian's debhelper will cover most standard build systems and Gentoo has eclasses that you just need to inherit in a package. I'm not sure that adding another makes things easier.

Configuration options will need to be specified manually if you want any but I don't see a way around that as they are both package-specific and also something where distros want to differ.

For dependencies there are usually language-specific registries and pkg-config for C/C++-land. Some distros (e.g. RPM-based-ones) already support specifying dependencies by the pkg-config names or library SONAMEs. There is no distro-agnostic way to specfy your dependencies except for a README as far as I know - this would be something worth specifying.