What do you mean by “more powerful” wrt CMake?
CMake is a turing-complete language with some APIs that Meson either doesn’t have an equivalent yet because it’s comparatively new (for example, until 2023, there was no built in way to get a relative path from two paths, and if you wanted that you had to shell out to an external program), or they aren’t going to add because it doesn’t fit their design.
Meson is (intentionally) limited in terms of extensibility, instead it tries to come with everything built in that you need, even down to specific library support like Qt, from what it seems like to me. For example, you cannot define your own functions, it ships builtin modules but does not allow other packages to provide their own (for example like KDE’s Extra CMake Modules), to name a few that I’m familiar with and why I was put off using it so far.
I have yet to see how actually limiting that is, going to try to move the project I’ve been working on for years that relies on some of these CMake features to Meson soon and see how it fares. But considering that big projects like GNOME use it all over the place it’s probably workable in practice, I’ll just have to rethink the existing approach a bit.
Is that considered bait?
Wasn’t it? Go’s build system is very much not what I would call an example of good design (exhibit A: load-bearing comments and file names).
Now that I think about it, dovecot drops permissions for security reasons (login runs as the “dovenull” user). It’s probably not a good idea to try to circumvent that actually.