Comment by noir_lord | Hacker News Reader

Comment by noir_lord | Hacker News Reader

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I write my own automation/build tools in Python

Envoy pynotify and fnmatch pretty much do the heavy lifting.

I do it this way because

    Since I know Python no extra syntax knowledge is required

    Python is going to be readable to me in 6 months when I've 
    forgotten the syntax of whatever build tool I just used

    *All* my machines desktop and servers already have Python 
    installed
    
    *It's fast, merging 20-30 largish text files takes around 
    10-15milliseconds

    * It's very very flexible (it's Python)

I used make extensively when I was at Uni and quite frankly if I never have to touch it again I would be a happy bunny.

It's an incredibly powerful and clever tool hiding behind an interface (that second to Git) is the worst I've ever had to use.

EDIT: I've actually been toying with the idea of writing a python library to simplify things as lots of the code I end up writing is very similar across projects, it's been one of my "think about in shower" projects for quite a while.

> a python library to simplify things

That's basically scons. Give it a try, I've been using it for years to manage a fairly complex, unusual build process with minimal effort (less than 200 lines of Python code).

http://www.scons.org/

Thanks for the link :).

Scons is awesome but for what I use Python for (minification of web assets, automatically running image optimisations) it's taking a sledgehammer to a walnut.

Fair enough, though I've found scons is extremely flexible and lightweight, in the sense that it's not very insistent about imposing a certain style or process on you. Unlike the vast majority of other build tools.

Have you looked at webassets? [0]

[0]: https://github.com/miracle2k/webassets

I'm not saying that it is a 'cure all', but actually make -n lets you dry run, and test out your rules before you actually use them (with "touch"), and in most cases I'm sure that that is faster than both reading the manual, and writing a python library for replicating the functionality (reinvent the wheel).

Now, this approach depends of course how well you know make to begin with. But there are a lot of examples out there, and the man pages of GNU make are quite good. It is quite true to the old make facility, so even older book examples should work with it.

I'm not knocking make, it's a good piece of software.

The reason I roll my own in Python is that I get exactly the functionality I want working in exactly the way I want and quite often I can replace a binary dependency which I use a tiny part of with a python function.

I find that reduces my cognitive load as I'm only working with one thing instead of others.

ymmv.

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