walk VS robo

Not impressed by shell incantations. What would sell such a tool to me is a feature to replace those with new and more intuitive syntax.

Holding on to how things are done in the shell is not a thing to be proud of. I think a lot of us around here stopped counting the times we got tripped by globbing, forgetting or misplacing one special character in a ${} block, or quoting.

Let those monstrosities die already. Please.

There's this tool -- https://github.com/ejholmes/walk -- that is pretty good and I liked it but dropped it for the same reasons: it leaves the heavy lifting to you and it depends on your mastery in the black arts.

Now obviously I'm not managing huge projects but nowadays https://github.com/casey/just serves me just fine for everything I need.

Check out walk[1]. It does exactly this. Lets you define a graph of dependencies in any language of your choice.

[1](https://github.com/ejholmes/walk/)

I really like the declarative style of make, to the extent that I've been abusing it as an automation tool. Doing things like checking if a server is alive or setting up a serial port. But due to limitations like depending on mtime and issues with special characters in targets, I've switched some of my more intensive Makefiles to prolog using this: https://github.com/webstrand/robo.

When I find the time I hope to write bindings for netlink for prolog, so that I can declaratively create and configure network namespaces. Complete declarative system configuration using prolog would be a dream come true.