41–50 of 223 posts
How does this compare with `just`[0]? I've never written a Makefile but I'm a big fan of `just`. [0] https://github.com/casey/just
I have coworkers who use this. They tried to make me use this too. I failed to see the point. It offers no benefits of a build system, no benefits of existing automation tools, comes with "bespoke" syntax and requires installing an extra program to run it. I have never tested it enough to discover things it does wrong, but given how new and not exactly popular this tool is, I bet there are lots of things it doesn't d…
I remember how I promoted Git over a decade ago, and I heard from the lead guy that “SVN does the same” and “there are no benefits of using branches” (he never used them). Please listen to your coworkers and don’t be that guy. Technology moves forward, make it great, but it’s time to move on.
(I hear svn may have improved merge tracking, but I'm not going to spend more time on it.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I found it amusing how the main features advertised for Task were the programming language used to write it, how it's distributed as a single executable, and how it's easy to install. None of them are relevant, or made any case for using it instead of just using the thing described in an international standard that is shipped by default in UNIX and Unix-like OSes for decades. It's like their selling point is to talk…
UNIX might be standard but it doesn't make it cross platform. You might not like it but a lot of people develop on windows. Build tools that assume a unix environment is present aren't a solution.
Ut is a solution for the vast majority of cases. Even most Windows environments use WSL.
I don't understand this argument: "it's 47 years old" as a bad thing. If something has been around that long, does it not mean it is proof tested? The syntax of Taskfile looks more verbose to me than Makefile, which is basically a shell script in disguise. To note also is that you praise Devenv because of it being based on Guix (Guile scheme), while you ditch Makefile which also embeds Guile scheme as the extension l…
As to why being unhappy is probably not because it haven't been proof tested. I get your sentiment but feel the remark is out of place. I thought the rationale for picking other tools was straightforward and motivated.
Though the simplicity of make has been lost and I'm not sure the overhead is worth it. I wouldn't want to be the one introducing taskenv, direnv and derenv to a project.
Sorry for the plug, but I can't help myself everytime I read about task managers to notice you have to learn yet another DSL. DSL are the plague of our field, for one that is useful like SQL, you have a hundred that turn your life into hell. Make's DSL is already full of gotchas, but templated YAML based DSL are just insanity. They have so many footguns, and so little flexibility and ability to be debugged. After try…
The same can be said about using general purpose programming languages to specify stuff declaratively, but instead of implementation the problems happen in each and every single use of it. It only takes a single user that either does not comply with standards or feels they are particularly clever to mess everything for everyone.
Scons using Pure Python Lang. No more DSL. https://scons.org/ It has cache facility to speed up re-builds. scons --implicit-cache I heard people say, Scons is slow, but it need not be if we use cache facility. Some people say Meson ( https://mesonbuild.com/ ) would be its successor, but I use scons for building my C/Python files. (ex: Python to .mpy files, asciidoc to pdf, html etc)
At my work we used it for a fairly large source tree and no-change incremental builds would take a good minute for scons to figure out there's nothing to do.
These days we use something based on google blueprint which generates ninja build files.
Sorry for the plug, but I can't help myself everytime I read about task managers to notice you have to learn yet another DSL. DSL are the plague of our field, for one that is useful like SQL, you have a hundred that turn your life into hell. Make's DSL is already full of gotchas, but templated YAML based DSL are just insanity. They have so many footguns, and so little flexibility and ability to be debugged. After try…
> DSL are the plague of our field, for one that is useful like SQL, you have a hundred that turn your life into hell. The same can be said about using general purpose programming languages to specify stuff declaratively, but instead of implementation the problems happen in each and every single use of it. It only takes a single user that either does not comply with standards or feels they are particularly clever to m…
We have few colleagues working on react-native who use windows, and it is easy to support them because it uses mvdan/sh for script execution.
Being able to organize tasks into multiple module specific taskfiles which can be merged (with auto-prefixing) into the top level taskfile is quite nice. The support for watch mode, timestamp checking, environment propagation with built in dotfile support are all nice features that we found very handy.
It would have been nicer if it used hcl but I can live with yaml. I am glad that it doesn't use a real programming language - it makes it easy to look at a task in isolation (we have hundreds) and figure out what it depends on and what it does.
It is easy to be dismissive of such tools when glancing at the homepage, but it is one of those tools that grow on you when you give it a chance. The author has also been addressing a lot of common pain points over the years for which we are thankful - it is nice to be able to trigger tasks from any subdir (similar to npm run ...) and the new editor integration is quite too.
I see people saying that you can do all that this tool does using a few simple scripts. But these scripts only start off as simple, once you need a watch mode, cross platform support, timestamp change detection, selective argument propagation, need to exec dependencies in right directories etc. they tend to get buggier and messier.
Sorry for the plug, but I can't help myself everytime I read about task managers to notice you have to learn yet another DSL. DSL are the plague of our field, for one that is useful like SQL, you have a hundred that turn your life into hell. Make's DSL is already full of gotchas, but templated YAML based DSL are just insanity. They have so many footguns, and so little flexibility and ability to be debugged. After try…
The truest statement of all of HN
It started off with configuration files, but then we needed logic, control flow, or variables; and for some reason nobody goes "ok, maybe we need an actual progamming language now" and instead we've created horrors beyond our comprehension.
Azure Pipelines is the worst I've used: three types of variables, conditional statements return string "True" and "False", and of course it's mostly undebuggable.