Well, I believe make is already the most succesful build tool, at least on every platform I'm caring about (ie any variant of unices + few more).
What you are describing looks like packaging more than building.
Pinning the versions of everything is not the build tool job.
I understand the standpoint of software publishers who want to limit the number of environments they have to suport, but proprietary software is not the use case that every tools should be optimizing for.
When, a nix user or a gentoo user decides that she wants this version of library X with this version of library Y, that's not make's job to overide her decision, is it?
We need some flexibility.
> When, a nix user or a gentoo user decides that she wants this version of library X with this version of library Y, that's not make's job to overide her decision, is it? We need some flexibility.
The user should absolutely be able to override it, but library X's build system should have some defaults and changing them should be a deliberate choice. "Build against whatever happens to currently be installed, and hope you get lucky and wind up with something that works" is not a great build experience.
What you are describing looks like packaging more than building. Pinning the versions of everything is not the build tool job.
I understand the standpoint of software publishers who want to limit the number of environments they have to suport, but proprietary software is not the use case that every tools should be optimizing for.
When, a nix user or a gentoo user decides that she wants this version of library X with this version of library Y, that's not make's job to overide her decision, is it? We need some flexibility.