Well... If by XML-based things you are thinking of Maven, they're not really at the same level. Maven is much more higher-level, and is fully declarative, which is both a blessing and a curse. I would not describe it as a general-purpose build system, it's really made for the Java ecosystem, but in this context, it works well for a majority of projects, because they can follow the rails. And it does handle out of the box automated retrieval of dependencies, which is way outside the scope of make.
It has its hear in the right place, though. High-level build systems should strive to be as declarative as possible. It's the rest of the design which is problematic :)
It has its hear in the right place, though. High-level build systems should strive to be as declarative as possible. It's the rest of the design which is problematic :)