bwk VS scripts-to-rule-them-all

Document the steps to setup dev environment in your own words and highlight the issues that you run into

Lots of people are commenting saying they have problems with this.

The first thing I do when working on an unfamiliar project is to write a SHELL SCRIPT that records everything I did. I keep that at the root of the git repo, usually as "run.sh".

For example here is what I did when hacking on Kernighan's awk 5 years ago:

https://github.com/andychu/bwk/blob/master/run.sh

So now 5 years later I can see exactly where I got the files from. And I usually count how much source code there is in a repo to get a feel for it, and I have that exact command.

And I was trying to figure out how much test coverage there is, so I ran a bunch of gcov stuff, which involve Python.

The shell script may not work now, but the point is that I can tell within 10 seconds what I did 5 years ago.

So basically I suggest becoming SHELL LITERATE and checking in shell script with comments. (You can also use a Makefile, but shell is less prescriptive about its model and has fewer gotchas. Make has all the gotchas of shell plus some more.)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25400278

Personally I like https://github.blog/2015-06-30-scripts-to-rule-them-all/ as a pattern and then let the authors do whatever crazy thing they want from there. In my experience, 99% of repos never move past using simple shell scripts with a few common functions with that pattern, and things are kept fairly simple. A select few repositories tend to mature enough that they are able to invest in swapping towards something more testable than shell scripts, and then you just have a couple people who stick to invoking `make` from the scripts but it's fine and nobody has to think about it except them. We don't stick to that exact set of scripts, but find that as long as you don't use more than like 10ish entrypoints in `script/*`, and have at least `script/bootstrap` it's fine.

I dig the general idea, but question the value add over a directory of `scripts` that follow sane conventions (ie `script/test`, `script/build` etc). Is the main thing that you can do `just -l` to see available commands? I have never really reached for `make` when I've had a choice, as I've done mostly ruby, JS, or java where you have more sane, humane tools (i.e. Rake, Yarn, Maven though that one is never fun).

My general approach is every repo should have something that follows https://github.com/github/scripts-to-rule-them-all, written in sh (maybe bash, its 2023), linted with shellcheck. When you need something fancy Rake is great or grab some nice bash command line helper and source it from all your scripts. Is a command listing really worth another dependency over what you get from `ls script` or `cat script/README` ?

Afaik AzDo cannot run tasks concurrently. From having had to work with azure pipelines I would highly suggest to use the github approach of Scripts to rule them all and avoiding predefined tasks unless absolutely necessary(Things that are complicated to implement and solutions already existing.

GitHub have a pattern for this called "scripts to rule them all" - https://github.com/github/scripts-to-rule-them-all - I've not fully adopted it yet but I probably should, it looks very well thought-out.

People at Github made an attempt to fix this situation: scripts to rule them all. The idea is to have common set of executable scripts for common developer tasks in a script/ directory in the root of every project:

https://github.com/github/scripts-to-rule-them-all