My problem with CMake, autotools &co. is that they will most of the time test useless thing, and can fail a build for no particular reason.
I've had a build fail because the sed version I used "presumably" faileto handle "long lines". In this case "long" was of perfectly arbitrary length, and by testing it by hand, it worked like a charm. The issue was that the configure script was using a GNU/sed specific flag for this test.
I've been working with many of these autotools-based software recently when working on making my own distro, and most of the time, they harm more than they help when you get out of the all-gnu path.