Mind pointing out any constructive arguments against it? I recently switched over from hand-built makefiles to cmake for one of my projects, and it's been a breeze.

I prefer autotools to CMake. Maybe I didn't really give CMake a fair shot, but in a few hours of trying, I couldn't out figure out the CMake equivalent to a bit of custom glue code in configure.ac that checked for a Lisp compiler.

I get the feeling CMake works fine as long as you color within the lines, but that it's much harder to extend than autotools is.

Yes, this is something I have thought through, though I may have been lucky/unlucky with my pick of projects. But generally speaking, installs I have installed based on GNU autotools, seems to install with less fuzz than those with C-Make. So, that, and the fact that there is full free documentation of GNU Autotools, even books out there, have made my personal choice easy.

For me the overall factor is the ease for any of my users, installing something I have written.

Using a macro language was already bad in the 90ies (autoconf/automake using m4), but using one in 2000 is just tragic.

It is also impossible to debug, partly because of the abomination the cmake language is: even understanding where a variable is defined is hard, and because the language is so unexpressive, the Find*.cmake modules are often in the 1000s lines count.

For all its suckiness, I take autoconf/automake over cmake.

I'm sorry, but your comment does not make much sense to me. autotools is mostly written in m4, with some shell snippets. Those are macro languages. If you don't like macro languages, logically you should not like autotools.

CMake is not "impossible to debug." In fact, it is a lot easier to debug than autotools-- partly because you end up writing so much less code. Also you don't have the three levels of "generated files generating other file generators" that you do in autotools.

For all its suckiness, I take autoconf/automake over cmake.

Well, we agree on one thing. autotools does suck.

My point was that autotools had the excuse of being written in the early 90ies, cmake doesn't.

Your experience with debugging autotools vs cmake does not match mine: cmake is not an improvement over autotools (if only because at least with autotools, there is some decent doc out there and google knows a lot about autoconf insanity). It took me hours to debug trivial issues with cmake, because you can't easily trace where variables are defined.

I have never been able to figure out how to cross-compile a project that uses CMake. GNU Make lets you just set some environment flags and drop in a different compiler.

CMake honors the same environment variables as Make. Just set them before running CMake.

CMake also supports cross-compiling. www.vtk.org/Wiki/CMake_Cross_Compiling