Yeah, there are lots of good build systems for C (didn’t know about this one; will have a look; thanks for sharing), but the problem is that they have tiny adoption, especially among “core” ecosystem packages, like coreutils and friends. The problem isn’t technical, it’s political and cultural. This ecosystem is hostile toward its users for no discernible reason.
If anyone knows of a distribution that aims to use only software with sane build systems, let me know, I would be very curious.
Bootstrapping and too many binary dependencies at the early stage is a known problem in GNU Guix and there are people working to fix it, such as the GNU Mes project to bootstrap the system using a minimal compiler, shell and set of utilities written in Scheme. Despite this, there are still many steps to bootstrapping a full system and the complete process is not simple.
It's not for "no reason", in general you will not be able to get away from having a complicated build system at the lowest level. Otherwise you would need to be prepared to give up on nice things like cross-compiling and supporting more than one compiler, CPU architecture, etc.
throwaway894345|5 years ago
If anyone knows of a distribution that aims to use only software with sane build systems, let me know, I would be very curious.
cycloptic|5 years ago
It's not for "no reason", in general you will not be able to get away from having a complicated build system at the lowest level. Otherwise you would need to be prepared to give up on nice things like cross-compiling and supporting more than one compiler, CPU architecture, etc.
yawaramin|5 years ago
Its claims to fame are support for multiple languages, reproducible builds, and system-wide package caching.