I think Bob has captured my feelings on this very well. In particular:
On Mon, May 16, 2016 at 10:38 AM, Bob Summerwill
CMake has "won". It isn't perfect, but it's the utterly dominant defacto standard. Unless there is an amazingly compelling reason not to migrate, putting together a CMake migration plan makes good sense.
I don't know Boost Build very well (I'm trying to learn more), but it seems like a perfectly fine build system. I wouldn't be surprised to discover that it's superior to CMake, since I'm very aware of that tool's many flaws. However, CMake is *good enough*, and far, far more popular than bjam. In fact, I believe Boost itself is the only bjam project I've ever used. To someone who comes from other open source projects, it creates a barrier to adoption and also bolsters the image of Boost as arcane and hard to understand. And the same kind of thinking should be applied to issue tracking, version
control, automation, etc, IMHO.
Ditto. In the web development world, the popularity of some default choices for each infrastructure element makes it fast to get new developers up to speed and makes a project look "friendly". If we want to attract more users and developers, we should do the same. Jeff