3 ms·

Why not Makefile ?

• jonathankoren 4y ago
  TIL Make is the Zoidberg of technologies. Also non trivial Makefiles quickly become an unintelligible mess of rules both explicit and implicit, and an endless stack of variables that never feel fully defined.
  • semi-extrinsic 4y ago
    I was going to make a funny comment about Make, but then I decided I can just link the Make documentation's page "The Two Flavors of Variables" [1] which links to definitions of the four different flavors of variables. [1] https://www.gnu.org/software/make/manual/html_node/Flavors.html https://www.gnu.org/software/make/manual/html_node/Flavors.h...
    • beepbooptheory 4y ago
      There are four kinds of assignment, the first applies to recursive variable flavors, the rest to simple ones. It's maybe something to learn, but why is this a bad thing? People make good jokes but anyone asserting that official GNU documentation is anything short of wonderful needs to learn to read again.
• habitue 4y ago
  The key insight here seems to be that you usually need to specify the tasks for a repo twice: once in your task runner (Makefile, package.json, bazel BUILD file) and then again in your readme so that people can learn what custom tasks exist and what they do. This tool tries out the idea that maybe if the readme was structured the right way, it could double as the task runner specification. That way, even if you don't have the tool installed (maybe because you're browsing the repo online instead of in your editor) you can still see what the tasks do alongside their instructions
  • proxysna 4y ago
    Seems like i missed the point. Thanks for explaining
• anentropic 4y ago
  Why not both?
• davidpfarrell 4y ago
  Make is not actually that great of a task runner, but the syntax is easy and its ubiquitous. I created a tool that allows you to define tasks in the easy make-style, but is purpose-build to be a task runner: * https://github.com/TekWizely/run https://github.com/TekWizely/run