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Comment by arcticfox | Hacker News Reader

Admitting ignorance here, I have never intentionally used a build system like this. My normal process for e.g. Python deployment is to write a Dockerfile that installs the dependencies, installs packages, and then copies my user code in. Then I use Pulumi to upload that image to a Docker repository & deploy it to a k8s instance.

What am I missing by doing that? This looks really slick, but I'm not sure how, why, or where to use it.

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Please excels in a mono-repo situation. We built Please because we struggled to get Buck to handle Python, Javasript, and Java while having protobuf code generation for all these languages.

Fast forward 5 years, now we're using Please to build all our code, generate hashes for docker images, template those hashes into our k8s .yamls, generate the documentation website from the docstrings in the proto files etc. etc.

With a language specific build system, you would have a lot of trouble handling things like this.

Speaking from my own limited experience, plz works really well for compiled languages, and total-build approaches (everything from source). I am not sure how much of a multiplier it is for python, apart from finer-grained dependency control and good sandboxing

Those kinds of systems are for building stuff, they assume and have multiple build steps with complex dependency relations (like autogen header -> Compile -> link -> test), and that each step takes dozens of seconds and maybe even minutes.

In your case, it seems you only have one non-trivial step: python dep install. So this system will be quite overkill for you.

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