I think it is important to clarify that the goal here is not to come up with the one system to rule them all.

For instance, let's consider a system like Debian, where you can rely on the Linux filesystem hierarchy standard and with the fact that the dependencies will be self consistent abi-wise.

In that case, producing a "target model" for satisfying dependencies for a build system is fairly straightforward, in fact, we just need a richer metadata format than what pkg-config does, but the principle of how it works would be mostly sufficient.

However, if you look at the HPC environment, where ABI and Hardware compatibility is managed in a completely different way, you wouldn't be able to solve the problem the same way.

The immediate goal here, given the above, is just to establish an interoperability language that would allow the different systems used on those environments to tell the build system (e.g.: cmake) what is the "target model" for the libraries being provided.

Daniel