> Why are you swallowing "error" from invoking the "reall" tool? That seems like a great way to make contributors really frustrated

Glad you're looking at the code! There's still some refactoring needed for butil. It will get more polished soon ;)

> This trend of "I'm going to invent some build tool because there are not enough build tools in the world" is evidently leaking out of the node ecosystem

butil applies string replacements, patches and overrides all under one tool using a statically typed language but still usable like a scripting lang since it can rebuild the actual tool as needed. You can technically do something similar with various python scripts I suppose and use chromium's GN build system . GN would just end up calling various scripts so I think i prefer this more unless you have some other ideas.