Re:Time for Makefiles to Make a Comeback
by Chris2048 on Tuesday September 05, 2017 @09:19AM
(#15174778)
You say the Pythonistas refused to use Gradle, but it also seems the JVM peeps refused to let go of it?
Isn't that the problem? Isn't Make more general than Gradle? If the project was primarily JVM, why couldn't the Pythonistas be forced to use whatever build system was mandated?
Re:Time for Makefiles to Make a Comeback
by meddlepal on Tuesday September 05, 2017 @09:38AM
(#15174948)
You'd have to reinvent a lot of wheels to replicate what Gradle (or Maven) does. For example dependency management, env setup and packaging. It would be similar to asking a Python developer to give up pip, setup/disttools and maybe virtualenv. In the end you want productive devs. Stripping away the tools they are productive with is counterproductive.
Re:Time for Makefiles to Make a Comeback
by Chris2048 on Tuesday September 05, 2017 @10:09AM
(#15175303)
But surely these are targets for make?
e.g a pip target that builds a python dep folder. You can do the same for Java with Apache Ivy.
Is Gradle not a make like system with a lot of JVM-specific functionality built in?
So the JVM folks created a crappy Makefile that accomplished some of the basic stuff to appease the Pythonistas. Meanwhile the JVM folks continued to use Gradle directly and the Python folks who had to work on the JVM projects got a shittier experience through the Makefile. As new tasks were added to build process the JVM folks would just write custom Gradle tasks to accomplish the job which would drive the Python folks nuts because they wanted shell scripts or make targets invoking shell scripts or whatever.
My only take away from this experience was developer tooling sucks and there is no one size fits all approach to build systems. Try to stick to a convention within an ecosystem (e.g. all JVM projects should use one of Gradle/Maven/Sbt), but don't try and get cute with making stuff more common than it has to be.