It's an odd mix of convention and bespoke madness. The convention part is that you set up a few variables and if the build system of the software is a good fit to common convention, things will just tend to work.
The bespoke madness comes in when there are slight departures from common convention and you must work out what variables to set and functions to define to fix it.
There are parts of the build system that are highly reminiscent of 1980s era BASIC programming. For example, I have seen build mechanisms where you must set variables first and then include or require a file. This is analogous to setting global variables in BASIC and then calling a subroutine with GOSUB because functions with arguments haven't been invented yet.
And that's not hyperbole.
It's an odd mix of convention and bespoke madness. The convention part is that you set up a few variables and if the build system of the software is a good fit to common convention, things will just tend to work.
The bespoke madness comes in when there are slight departures from common convention and you must work out what variables to set and functions to define to fix it.
There are parts of the build system that are highly reminiscent of 1980s era BASIC programming. For example, I have seen build mechanisms where you must set variables first and then include or require a file. This is analogous to setting global variables in BASIC and then calling a subroutine with GOSUB because functions with arguments haven't been invented yet.