On Tue, Jan 14, 2020 at 09:29 PM, Laurent Bercot said:
> Now, am I talking to software engineers, or do I really have to
> explain *why* the value of the project decreases with every useless
> additional applet, *even when* there is a configuration switch that
> can disable it at build time?
I don't disagree. But the problem is much worse.
IMO the problem with adding mini-make or mim to launch scripts is
that "make" is not at all simple and easy to understand and it is
100% unclear which features will be supported in mini-make and
which not. So it is basically creating a 3rd, crippled, language
which no one but the authors understand.
Further it is a big mistake to encourage people to use the wrong
tool for a job especially when the right tool is available and
is POSIX (or extended) shell scripting.
If we go in this direction then people will try to use mini-make
on real Makefiles and it will crash and burn and will cause a slew
of justified bug reports.
The original idea was perfectly terrible because it is horribly
broken. For example:
$ touch hello ; make hello
make: 'hello' is up to date
It is a very bad idea to encourage this misuse of tools for the
sake of letting some folks avoid learning the rudiments of shell
scripting. Using "make" to launch random scripts is a really bad
idea unless you really know what you're doing or you need some of
the features of "make" (see above). Creating a tool that
implements less than 1% of "make" to enshrine this bad behavior is
even worse.
Peace, James
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