How important is learning build system?
How important are learning build system or compiling language to develop softwares? For example i saw that ros is using catkin, or catkin build to build the ros packages or softwares. which is simular to cmake compiler language. and i also saw that most of the open source robotics related frameworks like opencv, pcl, xenomai, orocos, ace_orb all are based on cmake or make. So should i learn this compiling language in detail and as much seriously as the main programming language like c++/c, python, lua etc? If yes than why most people say that learning this is secondary and not that important for software development?
I believe this is rather off-topic for this forum, but in short: CMake is a DSL that allows you to configure build environments and build programs from source files. If you're going to be working with languages that need compilation, and will be using libraries and projects that already use it, ..
.. then spending some time learning CMake itself (which underlies Catkin) might make sense.
You'll probably quickly come to a point where you'll want to do something 'exotic' in CMake, which will force you to learn it a bit more. Till then, reproducing "magic incantations" is probably ok.