The problem with build systems is that people try to do too much with them. It wouldn't be so bad, if there was consistent, thorough documentation available, i

The problem with build systems is that people try to do too much with them. It wouldn't be so bad, if there was consistent, thorough documentation available, including for the various plugins that people put together and shared. But where things stand it's entirely too easy to have builds that only a few people really understand as they read through the build definitions. At their heart, builds are simple. Pull in dependencies. Process templated files. Copy files. Run a test suite. Compile/link/etc. Yet, with large projects there always seems to be something unique that requires a custom plugin or a day and a half trying to figure out how to move a particular step, or heaven forbid running the same kind of step twice at different stages. The way I see it - if you have to spend a day figuring out how to do anything with your build system, you have eliminated the benefit of said build system. You might as well build a shell script in half an hour that does what you want it to do. If someone can come along later and say "that's easy with ant/maven/gradle/buildr/make/etc." and can throw it together quickly along with a quick doc explaining the steps, then fantastic. I think time is better spent writing software than struggling through learning a build environment.