And your point is that it would be better to write pre/postprocessing logic in the build system? That sounds like a recipe for disaster and slow build times.

What I would advise is to think carefully about your custom pre-/post-processing tasks in light of how they will affect componentization and reuse. Working with many teams and codebases, it’s been my experience that having a lot of custom code generation or code parsing ties your code to your build system in ways that make it harder to re-use elsewhere, on different platforms or for different products. It also imposes a level of astonishment when analyzing dependencies - libraries that may appear to be largely independent of each other can actually be effectively coupled if one of them has a funky prebuild codegen step that depends on the other. Or coupled to the core build logic and source tree. If you really need the custom build step, and it really needs to be implemented in your build system, I’d encourage you to think about the tools and language you’re using.

If you build it, they will come. Don’t be surprised to find out that a good chunk of your business logic winds up in build files rather than what you would typically think of and analyze as your ‘source’.

I also have had bad experiences with scons and much prefer declarative build systems with options to escape to external executables when you really can't help it. Because the vast majority of the time, you can actually help it.

Having friction to using bespoke compilation steps is a feature in my experience, it means that devs will use standard build elements whenever possible and if a problem occurs the "wildcard" external binaries can more easily be probed and reviewed.

I think this is sort of the creator/maintainer conflict. Creators hate maven because they have their own idea about how their project should be structured and it’s different from maven’s. Maintainers love maven because they inherit a code base with a canonical structure.

> Coming from maven I can say the opposite.

To be fair, maven is in a class of its own with regards of designing a tool that is the worse of both worlds.