8 ms·

I decided a long time ago that it's not worth having to install and learn a different tool for every ecosystem just to avoid make's quirks. Yes, make isn't perf

I decided a long time ago that it's not worth having to install and learn a different tool for every ecosystem just to avoid make's quirks. Yes, make isn't perfect (it can even be quite annoying at times), but neither is everything else so it's worth it to me (from a personal and business perspective) to just make my developers use one thing for all projects, especially since it's already installed (or easily installable if not, there are packages for everything which may not be true of all the less popular alternatives) on most of their systems. Not that I couldn't ever see making an exception to that, I'm sure there are some things out there that don't work with the make model and really do need their own build system, but in general make is "good enough" and it's not worth using anything else.

tedmiston 8y ago
I pretty much went down the same path, though with all of Make's quirks, my generic Makefiles end up being nothing more than an index of commands that instead run bash scripts. But then the problem is shifted into bash's error prone syntax. So then for non-trivial logic, I end up having the bash script call a Python script, especially if dependencies are involved. It would be nice to have something like EditorConfig for project commands, i.e., my Sublime or your VS Code could parse one common Makefile (or similar) and map its commands to Build, Run, Debug, etc in the UI. In some sense, I think a different real solution is to Dockerize everything and then just docker build / docker run. Of course this can get complex for some projects, especially where the local setup is different than the production setup, e.g., Docker Compose vs Kubernetes for instance.