Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Taskfile: A Modern Alternative to Makefile

cloudnativeengineer.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 223 posts

Re: Taskfile: A Modern Alternative to Makefile

#51

Post by taspeotis »

amno wrote: post #21

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…

Can you use spaces in filenames with GNU make yet? Seems like a 47yo vestige when spaces in filenames weren’t really a thing…

Re: Taskfile: A Modern Alternative to Makefile

#52

Post by taspeotis »

kristiandupont wrote: post #11
ginko wrote: post #6

Just from reading the title i figured their idea of 'modern' was using something like yaml or json.

How Yaml of all things became so popular is a mystery to me. I am guessing the primary selling point is that it's sort of human readable similar to Markdown but even that (in fact, especially that) falls short when a configuration is more than just 5 lines, in my opinion. Trying to figure out which bullet this sub-bullet belongs to by holding my finger on the screen while scrolling is not an improved experience. And…

Yelling At My Laptop

Re: Taskfile: A Modern Alternative to Makefile

#53

Post by veltas »

BiteCode_dev wrote: post #16

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…

No need to apologise, I don't like YAML, I like Python, and I agree: I'd rather have a domain specific library than a DSL anyday.

The best of both worlds is a good programming language that allows expressing domain specific libraries almost as if they were domain specific languages, without going so declarative that people don't know how to script anything anymore.

I don't know if Python/doit really achieved that, but its task definitions seem almost as readable as the YAML, in a real language where I can do anything I want without asking permission. So I would always choose doit over Taskfile.

But a better comparison is between doit and make. I much prefer make's basic syntax, although I dislike newer features which inevitably have stretched the syntax beyond its original simplicity, but conceivably you can achieve something similar to make in a language but as a library rather than a DSL, and it would be immediately friendlier and more powerful than make. Depending on what I was doing I would use doit, but for something simple I've still got make (and it would be easy to convert if desired, in fact I have some projects in mind that could do with this!).

Re: Taskfile: A Modern Alternative to Makefile

#54

Post by high_priest »

prabhu-yu wrote: post #37

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)

Here I found an opinionated, but still very descriptive comparison of build tools the authors of SCons have experienced. https://github.com/SCons/scons/wiki/FromMakeToScons

Re: Taskfile: A Modern Alternative to Makefile

#55

Post by stephenr »

raverbashing wrote: post #15

Ok cool, let's see what this is about > Taskfile is just a dialect of YAML format with a specific syntax I imagined that. Ok bye Just write a js or python script. Or even a shell script Makefile syntax is bad but frankly YAML was a bad idea. (slightly less than XML sure)

XML is verbose. That’s the problem.

YAML is ridiculously complex, with a bunch of surprising behaviour.

I would take XML over YAML any day.

Re: Taskfile: A Modern Alternative to Makefile

#56

Post by kristiandupont »

sangnoir wrote: post #17
kristiandupont wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How Yaml of all things became so popular is a mystery to me. I am guessing the primary selling point is that it's sort of human readable similar to Markdown but even that (in fact, especially that) falls short when a configuration is more than just 5 lines, in my opinion. Trying to figure out which bullet this sub-bullet belongs to by holding my finger on the screen while scrolling is not an improved experience. And…

> Trying to figure out which bullet this sub-bullet belongs to by holding my finger on the screen while scrolling is not an improved experience I don't see this as any worse than figuring out where nested parentheses are closed: tooling helps. I'm almost certain there's a whitespace plugin equivalent of Rainbow Parentheses for your IDE/editor of choice

Yes, tooling helps, though I am not always in my IDE. And I agree that it shouldn't be worse than, say, JSON, but for one reason or another my brain seems to struggle with it just a bit more. It certainly does not seem like an improvement, which I feel is implied.

Re: Taskfile: A Modern Alternative to Makefile

#57

Post by tjoff »

BiteCode_dev wrote: post #16

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…

Python is such a massive dependency though, people who code in python rarely realize how big of a barrier it is for people not in that ecosystem. Package management is insane and every project has its own way of dealing with it. Installing python by itself is a chore on many operating systems.

Re: Taskfile: A Modern Alternative to Makefile

#58

Post by mongol »

BiteCode_dev wrote: post #16

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…

I am thinking there must be a doit kind of tool but using bash shell instead. Anyone aware of one?

Re: Taskfile: A Modern Alternative to Makefile

#59

Post by tannhaeuser »

IceSentry wrote: post #23
rewmie wrote: post #18

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.

nmake has been part of MS Visual Studio and former incarnations such as MSVC since basically forever (1988?). And while the shell language recognized by command.com limits nmake's usefulness, tar and curl have been added to standard Win installations only recently.

Re: Taskfile: A Modern Alternative to Makefile

#60

Post by crabbone »

kmac_ wrote: post #27
crabbone wrote: post #9

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 didn't like the transition from SVN to Git. My biggest problem was the commit numbering. While SVN assigned consecutive numbers to commits, Git assigned hashes.

I still think that most people working with VCS today would've been better off using SVN. Most companies use Git in a centralized way anyways -- they don't need the distributed feature of the system. Most people using Git today don't know how to go back in history and wouldn't be physically able to carry out this task if requested because most Git repositories I've seen in my life were, essentially, write-only, just a glorified rsync.

I needed many years of working in infra to come to terms with Git and become efficient at using it. Most developers using it today will not have a multiple-year rotation in infra position, and are terrible at using the tool.

But this is very different from Taskfile vs Makefile. Git came with many attractive features. Some, perhaps inconvenient or demanding in terms of learning, but it was a genuine new tool that solved a problem other tools at the time didn't (branches were very expensive in SVN, sharding repositories across large distances was very expensive in SVN, and Git solved both).

Taskfile doesn't do anything better than any of the existing tools. It doesn't even promise anything like that... It's just "like make" but worse... so, what's the point exactly?

> Technology moves forward

Oh you sweet summer child... no, it doesn't. Sometimes it moves backwards, sometimes it jumps in place pretending to do useful work... there's no rule to say it should, and the evidence abounds of how this statement isn't true.

Post reply on HN