scripts-to-rule-them-all VS just

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

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