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Please – A cross-language build system

please.build

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Re: Please – A cross-language build system

#51

Post by seba_dos1 »

__jem wrote: post #41
seba_dos1 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. For starters, it's much harder to suffer disastrous consequences from running truncated command due to terminated network connection when running an installer.

This is easily rectified by script authors by adding a main function invoked at the end. At a certain point, the argument simply becomes "executing arbitrary code is potentially dangerous", which is trivially true, and also not a helpful security posture for anyone who wants to use their computer pragmatically.

Why? I pragmatically use my computer with packages my distro offers me. When I download something from untrusted sources, I do take a quick look at what it is before executing it. It still is dangerous since I'm not able to spend time on verifying every single line of it, but it's up to me to decide whether that's an acceptable risk or not. All perfectly pragmatic.

I'm not a kind of person who's on a crusade against curling into bash, but I never do that myself because it feels dirty. It gives me no advantages and makes me unable to even take a quick look to reassure myself that things at least look like what I'd expect them to be.

Re: Please – A cross-language build system

#52

Post by cbhl »

mdoms wrote: post #11

It's hard to tell what the value proposition is here, apart from vague hand-waving about parallelization. The quick start is not enough to get started actually building something. Changing build systems is hard, and getting buy-in from the team even harder - so you need to demonstrate value up front.

The FAQ suggests it's inspired by Google's blaze, because bazel hadn't been open-sourced at the time of writing.

https://please.build/faq.html

Re: Please – A cross-language build system

#53

Post by tatskaari »

gravypod wrote: post #48
tatskaari wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey, I maintain please and will be the first one to admit we’re not the best at marketing it. We’ve mostly been focused on getting it up to scratch and only recently have we been trying to publicise it. With that being said I have put a good amount of work into the QuickStart. The code labs are designed to get you up and started in an inviting way. If you have any specific feedback about your QuickStart experience I’…

Thanks for all the hard work! I'm very excited to see where this goes. Have you considered sponsoring, or accepting donations, to work on IDE integration? That's pretty much the only reason I migrated my current employers codebase over to Bazel instead of Please.

Hey! Glad you liked it :D Please is owned by Thought Machine. They’ve recently (8 months) brought me on the project full time. We’re planning on putting together a dedicated IDE team together but no promises.

Re: Please – A cross-language build system

#55

Post by catlifeonmars »

tatskaari wrote: post #42
mdoms wrote: post #11

It's hard to tell what the value proposition is here, apart from vague hand-waving about parallelization. The quick start is not enough to get started actually building something. Changing build systems is hard, and getting buy-in from the team even harder - so you need to demonstrate value up front.

Hey, I maintain please and will be the first one to admit we’re not the best at marketing it. We’ve mostly been focused on getting it up to scratch and only recently have we been trying to publicise it. With that being said I have put a good amount of work into the QuickStart. The code labs are designed to get you up and started in an inviting way. If you have any specific feedback about your QuickStart experience I’…

Agree with the OP. I went through both the Python and Go quickstarts. They were easy to follow, but I’m also not seeing the value proposition. The build system has different DSLs for different languages so I’m not seeing the advantage of switching from I.e. go install ./... for Go and setuptools for Python? No offense, but you didn’t answer the question: what’s it good for?

Re: Please – A cross-language build system

#56

Post by gumby »

samspenc wrote: post #6
Yajirobe wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Please (please.build) 'build' kind of indicates that

Unfortunately for those of us following HN through RSS readers (like Feedly) the URL doesn't show until you mouse over the link ... but even then, I agree adding that additional piece of information such as "build software" would be useful.

Most RSS clients don’t have that bug.

Re: Please – A cross-language build system

#57

Post by tatskaari »

Asmodean wrote: post #16
mdoms wrote: post #11

It's hard to tell what the value proposition is here, apart from vague hand-waving about parallelization. The quick start is not enough to get started actually building something. Changing build systems is hard, and getting buy-in from the team even harder - so you need to demonstrate value up front.

For me it has the feeling of something I would play around with in my free time. But as a drop in replacement I agree, it's a bit of a hard sell for me.

Yup fair enough. Migrating build systems is hard. I've put some work into making migrating from a `go build` project to Please a bit easier. Banzai cloud recently migrated their [Pipeline](https://github.com/banzaicloud/pipeline) project over to use Please but admittedly it was quite a lot of work for them.

Re: Please – A cross-language build system

#58

Post by hyperrail »

nindalf wrote: post #2

Title can possibly be modified to mention that this is a tool to build code.

For what it's worth, I think the too-short title is pretty normal for HN. I'd blame its less than optimum informativeness on HN's cultural norm of short link titles, as reinforced by the administrators' moderation.

Re: Please – A cross-language build system

#59

Post by karmakaze »

tatskaari wrote: post #42
mdoms wrote: post #11

It's hard to tell what the value proposition is here, apart from vague hand-waving about parallelization. The quick start is not enough to get started actually building something. Changing build systems is hard, and getting buy-in from the team even harder - so you need to demonstrate value up front.

Hey, I maintain please and will be the first one to admit we’re not the best at marketing it. We’ve mostly been focused on getting it up to scratch and only recently have we been trying to publicise it. With that being said I have put a good amount of work into the QuickStart. The code labs are designed to get you up and started in an inviting way. If you have any specific feedback about your QuickStart experience I’…

What was/is the motivation for this build system that an existing one doesn't satisfy?

Re: Please – A cross-language build system

#60

Post by tatskaari »

arcticfox wrote: post #25

Admitting ignorance here, I have never intentionally used a build system like this. My normal process for e.g. Python deployment is to write a Dockerfile that installs the dependencies, installs packages, and then copies my user code in. Then I use Pulumi to upload that image to a Docker repository & deploy it to a k8s instance. What am I missing by doing that? This looks really slick, but I'm not sure how, why, or w…

Please excels in a mono-repo situation. We built Please because we struggled to get Buck to handle Python, Javasript, and Java while having protobuf code generation for all these languages.

Fast forward 5 years, now we're using Please to build all our code, generate hashes for docker images, template those hashes into our k8s .yamls, generate the documentation website from the docstrings in the proto files etc. etc.

With a language specific build system, you would have a lot of trouble handling things like this.

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