The libpd CMakeLists.txt might be a good starting point.
I have used CMake for some specific things, but in general I find autotools to be the easiest to use for (non-Windows) end users, especially those on Linux that are more used to the paradigm. It's always a beast to set up, but stays stable for a long time.
One danger I'd like to avoid is all of the Windows people *not* using the autotools build as then we lose testing and further updates on that platform. Keep in mind that the autotools build is now used for Miller's "canonical" releases.
There has been interest for using CMake for libpd, so I could see
that as a companion method to build Pd but not a replacement for autotools IMO.Actually, I would volunteer to setup a CMake build system for Pd. CMake is really nice because it supports so many tool chains out of the box, including Visual Studio solutions and Unix Makefiles for MinGW.Of course, this is not high priority, so I might give it a shot in summer or so.Christof