just VS doit

I don't like makefiles, but I've been enjoying justfiles: https://github.com/casey/just

I started using just [0] on my projects and have been very happy so far. It is very similar to make but focused on commands rather than build outputs.

Define your recipes and then you can compose them as needed.

[0] https://github.com/casey/just

just - https://github.com/casey/just

Welp there is absolute chaos in that thread -- guess it's not an April Fools joke.

I wonder if relying on CI for anything other than provisioning machines is a mistake -- maybe we should have never moved from doing things from local scripts written in $LANGUAGE.

That said, I'm probably biased since I'm a massive fan of things like `make` and more appropriately for the current age, `just`[0]

[0]: https://github.com/casey/just

> When a command has some cognitive requirements I create a script with some ${1:-default} values and I store them all in $PATH enabled local/bin

I would consider using just for this:

https://github.com/casey/just

Your coworker's experience is more principled: Make is a mediocre tool for executing commands. It wasn't ever designed for that. Although it is pretty common to see what you are mentioning in projects because it doesn't require installing a dependency.

For a repo where an easy to install (single binary) dependency is a non-issue, consider using just. [1] You get `just -l` where you can see all the command available, the ability to use different languages, and overall simpler command writing.

[1] https://github.com/casey/just

This is fantastic, but I'd say that this solution is somewhat in response to this open issue from 2019:

https://github.com/casey/just/issues/429

I really wish just was included as a package in distributions.

So far, I didn't work on new features at all but on stabilizing the ground for further development: 1. CMake lists and modules were rewritten a lot, now managing builds and their configurations is much lesser pain. 2. Brought in Justfile for regular tasks, and it's great, no less. 3. Linters, formatters, analyzers for almost all the code (except for Janet for now, as because of it being a niche and young technology, it didn't get enough attention yet). 4. ECS stub. Now runtime class doesn't look like a god object. 5. Started writing unit tests which didn't happen with my personal projects before and maybe indicates how serious am I about this one :D 6. Some of previously hardcoded data has been moved to INI files. Now, if I release the game in 10 years, and in 10 more years some eccentric person decides to make a variant of it, it will be slightly simpler.

i've grown to like this for my personal projects. https://github.com/casey/just

I like mage for Go and doit for Python.

Some competitors - Rake (ruby) - Bake - Earthly - SCons - doit

An alternative to Scons could be Doit (<https://pydoit.org/>), which if I remember correctly was built as a faster alternative to Scons. See also reasons of some users to prefer the later to other mentioned here: <https://pydoit.org/stories.html>.

If you code in Python, your probably should use the language as much as possible and avoid calling shell commands.

E.G:

- manipulate the file system with pathlib

- do hashes with hashlib

- zip with zipfile

- set error code with sys.exit

- use os.environ for env vars

- print to stderr with print(..., file=...)

- sometimes you'll need to install lib. Like, if you want to manipulate a git repo, instead of calling the git command, use gitpython (https://gitpython.readthedocs.io/en/stable/)

But if you don't feel like installing a too many libs, or just really want to call commands because you know them well, then the "sh" lib is going to make things smoother:

https://pypi.org/project/sh/

Also, enjoy the fact Python comes with argparse to parse script arguments (or if you feel like installing stuff, use typer). It sucks to do it in bash .

If what you need is more build oriented, like something to replace "make", then I would instead recommend "doit":

https://pydoit.org/

It's the only task runner that I haven't run away from yet.

Remember to always to everything in a venv. But you can have a giant venv for all the scripts, and just she-bang the venv python executable so that it's transparent. Things don't have to be difficult.

I've been using Doit for a project which involves gathering together documents made up of multiple Markdown files and converting to multiple formats. It's really cool but has some irritations. It didn't end up being much simpler than Make for me. I'm interested in trying some of the alternatives people have posted.

The code for all of this is available here, and described in detail in my article. I'm particularly fan of doit for this type of project, and highly encourage everyone to check it out!

Instead, I use pydoit (which is basically a Python version of make). It's simple, flexible, and quite extensible. So, here's what I do with it: