Meson is a build system somewhat like cmake, but without all of the
rough edges. It supports many OSes, including all of the major ones, and
a large number of C++ compilers.
My interest isn't really in convincing people to use meson as the
default here, but meson provides a subproject mechanism that can fetch
external projects and build them along with the main project in a single
configure/compile invocation. This is extremely useful for platforms
that lack a (competent) package manager.
As far as I know the meson build does everything the cmake build does,
with one exception: generate the cmake config/version files. meson can
generate these files, but only in simple cases, and not when using
export targets like tinyxml2 does.
