Be Aware of the Makefile Effect

If I had a nickel for every time I have seen a Makefile straight up copied from other projects and modified to "work" while leaving completely unrelated unnecessary build steps and targets in place.

It's a major pet peeve of mine.

Re: Be Aware of the Makefile Effect

#7

Post by ratmeadow » Sat, Jan 11, 2025, 6:44 AM UTC

At my work I've noticed another contributing factor: tools/systems that devs need to interact with at some point, but otherwise provide little perceived value to learn day-to-day.

Example is build system and CI configuration. We absolutely need these but devs don't think they should be expected to deal with them day to day. CI is perceived as a system that should be "set and forget", like yeah we need it but really I have to learn all this just to build the app? Devs expect it to "just work" and if there are complexities then another team (AKA my role) deals with that. As a result, any time devs interact with the system, there's a high motivation to copy from the last working setup and move on with their day to the "real" work.

The best solution I see is meet the devs halfway. Provide them with tooling that is appropriate simple/complex for the task, provide documentation, minimise belief in "magic". Tools like Make kinda fail here because they are too complex and black-box-like.

Re: Be Aware of the Makefile Effect

#8

Post by fithisux » Sat, Jan 11, 2025, 6:47 AM UTC

Alias, cmake effect.

Re: Be Aware of the Makefile Effect

#9

Post by szarnyasg » Sat, Jan 11, 2025, 6:50 AM UTC

I have observed the Makefile effect many times for LaTeX documents. Most researchers I worked with had a LaTeX file full of macros that they have been carrying from project to project for years. These were often inherited from more senior researchers, and were hammered into heavily-modified forks of article templates used in their field or thesis templates used at their institution.

Re: Be Aware of the Makefile Effect

#10

Post by baobun » Sat, Jan 11, 2025, 6:51 AM UTC

Good points in general.

On the other hand, there are cases where (beneficial/desired) verbosity prompts copy-paste and tweaking - not due to complexity but from some form of scale or size of the input.

In many cases this is a sign of something that should be dynamic data (put it in a db instead of conf) but that's not always the case and worth the tradeoff in the moment.