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Comment by pdimitar | Hacker News Reader

Not impressed by shell incantations. What would sell such a tool to me is a feature to replace those with new and more intuitive syntax. And a terser one, too.

Holding on to how things are done in the shell is not a thing to be proud of. I think a lot of us around here stopped counting the times we got tripped by globbing, forgetting or misplacing one special character in a ${} block, or quoting.

Let those monstrosities die already. Please.

There's this tool -- https://github.com/ejholmes/walk -- that is pretty good and I liked it but dropped it for the same reasons: it leaves the heavy lifting to you and it depends on your mastery in the black arts.

Now obviously I'm not managing huge projects but nowadays https://github.com/casey/just serves me just fine for everything I need.

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Nobody forces you to use any kind of shell with redo. Its .do files can be anything you want: ELF object files, shell scripts, Perl, Python, whatever, just make it executable and obey trivial simple rules (stdout and three arguments).

I see. That makes it a little better. At least we can utilize higher-level scripting then. Cool.

I'm still not sure about having more than one file that's handling building however...

And again noone forces you to use multiple files too :-). You can literally have just single default.do file for the whole project. apenwarr/redo somewhere explicitly noted that. Separate .do files are only for convenience and ability to automatically depend on target's build rules independently from others, that Make just do not do at all.

Well, the fact that this is a bit confusing is not a good sign. But maybe I should read the page again and more slowly.

> Let those monstrosities die already. Please. https://github.com/thought-machine/please

I got turned off by the docs when I wanted to try this tool some months ago, maybe it's worth to revisit. Do you recommend it? Do you use it often?

Using it without Bazel experience is not recommended. It is very rough around the edges, I often had to refer to Bazel docs when using it.

Thanks for the honest take, appreciate it.

Did you try https://pydoit.org/, it's a build tool in similar spirit, which allows the actions to be either python-functions or external programs. Try to look past their tutorial 1, I don't know why they mixed in module_imports there, making it look a lot more complicated than what it really is.

Nice idea, I like it. I have no use for Python functions however, and the startup time of the interpreter will likely get in the way since I need a tool I can invoke many times in scripts as well.

Will try it for sure though, thank you for the link.

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