X.Org package wrangler Alan Coopersmith at Oracle announced today the release of imake 1.0.11, the newest version of this utility that 20+ years ago was used extensively as part of the X Window System build process for generating Makefiles from a template. With this first imake point release in two years, imake itself can now be built via Meson and there is now support for RISC-V and LoongArch architectures.
Over the past twenty years the still-active X11 / X Window System code has transitioned largely over to GNU Autoconf and Automake while in more recent years seeing increased Meson adoption too. But for any old X code remnants not yet adapted or wanting to build older versions of said software, imake is still needed


The impression that I got from this article is that even the author of imake feels the same way, and is only maintaining it out of consideration for legacy software still using it.