This really speaks to me. Modern software is too hard to assemble from source. If you're shipping sources, every moving part you add increases the odds of somet

This really speaks to me. Modern software is too hard to assemble from source. If you're shipping sources, every moving part you add increases the odds of something going wrong on other people's computers. It's worth having some skepticism of tools. By making some operations easy, tools encourage them. Build systems make it easy to bloat software. Package managers make it easy to bloat dependencies. This dynamic explains why Python in particular has such a terrible package management story. It's been around longer than Node or Rust, so if they seem better -- wait 10 years! For many of my side projects I try to minimize moving parts for anyone (usually the '1' is literally true) who tries them out. I work in Unix, and one thing I built is a portable shell script that acts like a build system while being much more transparent about what it does: https://codeberg.org/akkartik/basic-build https://codeberg.org/akkartik/basic-build When I use this script my build instructions are more verbose, but I think that's a good thing. They're more explicit for newcomers, and they also impose costs that nudge me to keep my programs minimalist. You can see this build system evolve to add partial builds and parallel builds in one of my projects: https://github.com/akkartik/mu1/blob/master/build0 https://github.com/akkartik/mu1/blob/master/build0 https://github.com/akkartik/mu1/blob/master/build1 https://github.com/akkartik/mu1/blob/master/build1 https://github.com/akkartik/mu1/blob/master/build2 https://github.com/akkartik/mu1/blob/master/build2 https://github.com/akkartik/mu1/blob/master/build3 https://github.com/akkartik/mu1/blob/master/build3 https://github.com/akkartik/mu1/blob/master/build4 https://github.com/akkartik/mu1/blob/master/build4 Each of these does the same thing for this one repo -- build it -- but adding successively more bells and whistles. I think providing just the most advanced version, build4, would do my users a disservice. It's also the most likely to break, where build0 is rock solid. If my builds do break for someone, they can poke around and downgrade to a simpler version.