Now I personally would rather not use a pre 1.0 release of an entirely different programming language to compile my C projects instead of a cross-platform C compiler, but people can do whatever they want.
If you think that cmake is complicated, when in reality all it does is set targets using a declarative stye, then programming might not be for you.
That's like the hello world of cmake builds
Bigger cmake builds are doing dependency resolution, configuration tests, and configuration for development or release builds/installs.
Go poke at the cmake logs and result artifacts in Debug/Release build types and see if it's "just declaring targets."
find_package(foo)
#...
target_link_libraries(myapp foo::Static)
> configuration tests,
I don't know what you mean by configuration tests. I don't think I ever added any test resembling that description other than sanity checks in cmake find modules and sanity checks on projects just for convenience.
> and configuration for development or release builds
Those are not handled by cmake other than setting a flag that's used in the code.
> /installs.
You don't need to do anything other than setting the install target.
https://cmake.org/cmake/help/latest/command/install.html
I think you're either wildly exaggerating or you've been creating your own problems.
I’m genuinely curious if it’s actually easier, but I’m assuming you’re just using a different tool, maybe without as much historical baggage (and incompatible implementations)…
