And I was not talking about support for generating packages, all I want from it is to install everything into some subdirectory.

Yes, that’s the most useful thing from a packager point of view. What I was trying to say was that this is part of supporting installation in the build system and these days the major demand for installation support is for features like CPack and I’m a bit dubious about them, especially for generic “Linux” systems.

And I was not talking about support for generating packages, all I want from it is to install everything into some subdirectory.

BTW: CMake includes nice tool called CPack, which can generate some binary and source packages with minimal effort. I did not use it actually for any Linux binary packages (and I don’t know what it actually supports), but I can generate Windows installer for cross compiled program using it on Linux without problems.

There’s also the question of how good an idea it is to put installation and packaging into a build tool – doing them right is a tricky enough thing that it keeps distributions of various kinds going quite well. There’s enough platform specifics to doing it well that you can easily wind up creating trouble, particularly when you’re also targeting things that don’t even try to look like Windows.

Of course, the whole installation thing gets even more tricky these days since the demand from upstreams seems to be more for things that will produce packages rather than install onto the filesystem.

However I’d expect that something newly created would have such thing implemented. And CMake has it. I don’t know other new build systems, but this is simply feature I expected to be there and I was quite surprised that it is missing. However this only convinced me that I choose good way, when I decided to use CMake .