This pattern of usage always seems like abuse.
When `make` is used as a glorified front-end to `bash` scriptlets, why not use `bash` directly instead of having two-level of scripting?
See: https://blog.aloni.org/posts/bash-functional-command-relay/
When `make` is used as a glorified front-end to `bash` scriptlets, why not use `bash` directly instead of having two-level of scripting?
See: https://blog.aloni.org/posts/bash-functional-command-relay/
You can do that in Bash. And now you've reinvented Makefile, but poorly.
I made a bash script that takes your Makefile and gives you a nice dialog menu for the targets that have comments. Works nicely as a self documenting project command menu.
https://gist.github.com/oppianmatt/dcc6f19542b080973e6164c71...
https://private-user-images.githubusercontent.com/48596/3262...
- tab completion of targets
- automatic dependency execution
- automatic entry points between every task
- result caching
- parallel execution
Sure, you can do it in bash, or python, or whatever. But then you have a cumbersome, not particularly interesting piece of code full of boiler plate. Of course, you can design it a bit, organise things neatly, and then use a config file because fiddling with the code in each project is unsustainable in the long run. At this point, you’ve just made a poor copy of make and thrown away all the good bits that result from decades of experience and weird corner cases.
The syntax of Makefiles is terrible, but make itself is very useful and versatile.
And that pattern is not abuse, it’s the sort of things Make was designed for. It’s just that we’re used to think of make as this old thing that just runs a compiler and that’s such a pain to deal with that we need Makefile generators to do it properly. And certainly that’s true for complex software compilation, but make is more versatile than that.
Certainly abuse, but hey.