> This rant more or less equally applies to other language-specific build systems.
And yet those language-specific build systems are overwhelmingly winning, in pretty much every language.
> As Fedora packager for OCaml packages,...
I honestly think traditional Linux packaging is in the wrong here and the problems are essentially self-inflicted (not in the sense that individual maintainers are doing something wrong, but in the sense that the policy that traditional Linux distributions are following is inherently unsustainable. It's designed for a pre-CPAN world)
> As an upstream OCaml developer, the whole thing falls down the minute you need to integrate other programming languages into your build (or OCaml code into a code base written in another language).
True up to a point, but frankly the worst case is falling back to a terrible C-style build, and "always do terrible C-style builds in case you need to integrate with C code" is not a proposition that has much appeal.
Much as I wish the whole world would standardise on Maven or Cargo, I can't see a realistic path to there without first eliminating C, because the C people are never going to agree to follow a standard for package repositories.