I personally think CMake is a bad idea to use for something like pacman. It's a bit saner and easier to use, but it's HUGE (~24MB on disk) compared to autotools (~4MB on disk) and to build CMake itself takes quite a while (~20 minutes on a fairly decent 2.8GhZ Pentium 4 under no load). While I dislike autotools, I think for critical system components, using CMake is too heavy and a bit stupid.
Good points you've just mentioned here. Did not think of it.
I don't like autotools either but probably because I do not understand it. And I do not not other build systems either , so ... :) Just for reference, another alternative that was proposed some times ago : http://mailman.archlinux.org/pipermail/pacman-dev/2008-June/006837.html
Yup. Well, I guess xavier's answer will be good to keep as a reference, too. Sorry for the noise. Yannick LM