sub VS make-booster

Scripts in bin have no documentation, no easy way to enumerate them, etc. There is definitely a time and a place for bin scripts, especially as things grow in complexity. However the beauty of just is that there's one file (the justfile) that defines all of your project's actions. You don't have to go spelunking into bin to figure out how to tweak a compiler flag, etc. And since just will run anything there's no reason why your complex bin scripts can't just be called from a simple one liner task in a justfile.

Could your write a bash script that does stuff like enumerate all the bin scripts, pull out documentation comments, etc.? Absolutely, and people have followed that pattern for a while (see https://github.com/qrush/sub) but it's a bunch of boilerplate to copy between projects. Just pulls out that logic into a simpler config file.

Many moons ago Basecamp published sub (github) which runs on a similar idea with different tradeoffs being chosen.

For a very different approach, check out make-booster:

https://github.com/david-a-wheeler/make-booster

Make-booster provides utility routines intended to greatly simplify data processing (particularly a data pipeline) using GNU make. It includes some mechanisms specifically to help Python, as well as general-purpose mechanisms that can be useful in any system. In particular, it helps reliably reproduce results, and it automatically determines what needs to run and runs only that (producing a significant speedup in most cases). Released as open source software.

https://github.com/david-a-wheeler/make-booster

I think a lot of hate on make is due to poor use. If your makefile is complex, refactor it. Auto-generate dependencies (it only takes a few lines in GNU make). And don't use recursive make, that way lies madness. I also think GNU make is the wiser tool; POSIX make lacks too much in many cases.

https://github.com/david-a-wheeler/make-booster

From its readme:

"This project (contained in this directory and below) provides utility routines intended to greatly simplify data processing (particularly a data pipeline) using GNU make. It includes some mechanisms specifically to help Python, as well as general-purpose mechanisms that can be useful in any system. In particular, it helps reliably reproduce results, and it automatically determines what needs to run and runs only that (producing a significant speedup in most cases)."

"For example, imagine that Python file BBB.py says include CC, and file CC.py reads from file F.txt (and CC.py declares its INPUTS= as described below). Now if you modify file F.txt or CC.py, any rule that runs BBB.py will automatically be re-run in the correct order when you use make, even if you didn't directly edit BBB.py."

This is NOT functionality directly provided by Python, and the overhead with >1000 files was 0.07seconds which we could live with :-).