The Ninja build tool

Last time I needed to use CPack was a while ago but if I recall correctly, CPack's "make dist" just zips up your source directory (including any untracked files that may be lying around) and you can't get it to include some generated files (i.e. files that are generated from a maintainer build, that you don't expect users to generate because the build-time dependencies are onerous).

On the other hand if I needed to create a Windows & OS X installer I wouldn't dream of doing it by hand, I'd use CMake/CPack.

The main personal discovery that I wanted to share was that when you have very custom needs[1] generating dumb build files (whether they're Ninja files or explicit Makefiles) from Python is way better than using `make` alone, or Python alone, or a higher-level build system that's designed for more conventional needs.

[1]: My own use case is more like an integrator / distro packager, where I'm building an Operating System image from many components (I'm also the upstream of some of those components, other components may be using CMake or some other build system).