I don't understand what you mean, if it has the same interface as autotools how do you remove the legacy stuff without breaking anything?
Autotools is a huge pain in the ass for the dev, unfortunately I haven't found any alternative that didn't end up being an even bigger annoyance.
A decent, simple, easily customizable and portable C/C++ build system is still very much a unsolved problem as far as I'm concerned (and I've tried quite a few of them). At least autotools are supported basically everywhere.
I'm confused. Are you suggesting this leaner version should exist and it does not? Or are you advocating for a leaner version that I have not heard of?
This whole discussion and article had me thinking about that.
CMake is faster than autotools and works fine with all the compilers talked about so far and all the windows compilers I know of.
Creating a CMakeLists.txt covering moderately complex build that links against a few libraries (but doesn't need and custom logic for moving files or other uncommon stuff) is normally just a few lines of code. Usually just one line of code per source file and per library (depending on how you feel about automatically including files this can be further shortened), then a little bit declaring the language and other settings. There are plenty of 10 line CMakeLists that can build large and seemingly complex projects.
Autotools is a huge pain in the ass for the dev, unfortunately I haven't found any alternative that didn't end up being an even bigger annoyance.
A decent, simple, easily customizable and portable C/C++ build system is still very much a unsolved problem as far as I'm concerned (and I've tried quite a few of them). At least autotools are supported basically everywhere.