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Why do you feel it's better to do the build system's job manually? I've seen beginners interact with such a system and it's a recipe for even more confusion.

• palata 4y ago
  > Why do you feel it's better to do the build system's job manually? What's better is what is easier to understand and maintain. If your whole project is made of one file and builds with one simple call to a compiler, IMO it's fine to just have this line in the README, no need for a custom_target in cmake. Now the thing is that often, I see that people put a lot of importance into the "it should be easy to get started for beginners who don't know the tools", and everything is glued together using some custom functions. The goal being that a beginner can essentially run "make" (yep, I've seen Makefiles wrapping CMakeLists for that) and the project will build (sometimes it will even install dependencies on the system, that's crazy). But then if the beginner wants to understand what's happening under the hood, well... it's a big pile of custom glue. Now if, instead of that, you document the tools you are using in your README, and use the tools in a standard way, then people who know the tools will get started quickly ("oh, it's protoc then cmake, I know exactly how to use that"). And yeah, beginners will need to learn how to run those tools. But that's fine IMO, because if you use the tools the standard way (without custom functions), then the beginner can just look for the official docs. Standard is better than custom.