"Only worse" is probably not fair. Though, is it really surprising that a newer make file degenerates into the same problems as old ones?
Which will then lead down a path of a set of scripts/utilities on top of said system to standardize on a set of targets and deal with known issues. And suddenly we have reinvented another old tool, autotools. We'll probably find ourselves in their troubles soon enough.
There was a link submitted here (I can't find it now) a few weeks ago that talked exactly about that. Most build systems are just reimplementations of make, which makes them worse , because make has been battle tested for ages.
Amusingly, that story is what convinced me to finally read up on autotools. It has been interesting to see just how much they already covered.
In fact, the only thing the autotools don't do, that every current tool does, is download the dependencies. Which, is not surprising, since fast network connections are a relatively new thing.
And I'm actually not sure I care for the download of dependencies thing. It is nice at first, but quickly gets to people pushing another thing to download, instead of making do with what you have. This is plain embarrassing when the downloaded part offers practically nothing on top of what you had.
