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Re:Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Build Systems (2012) by ioquatix on Sunday January 21, 2018 @03:00AM (#16197265)
As the author of a build system, which took 5 years to bring to completion, and is now used in commercial applications, I feel like this list is not that helpful.

A modern build system does sacrifice generality in order to improve performance and simplicity.

e.g. A build graph with cycles is non-deterministic, which is not a great property of a reliable and repeatable build tool.

Most modern build tools will impose limitations to respect people's sanity, and I'm personally of the opinion that a build system should really expose high level rules for the most common tasks.

Re:Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Build Systems (2012) by clacke2 on Sunday January 21, 2018 @03:11AM (#16197287)
Re:Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Build Systems (2012) by ioquatix on Sunday January 21, 2018 @04:50PM (#16200238)
Yeah, it's teapot. Thanks, I fixed the link :)
Re:Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Build Systems (2012) by ahartmetz on Sunday January 21, 2018 @12:31PM (#16198936)
I had similar thoughts about the acyclic graph "falsehood". Sure you can have a cyclic graph, but then your build system is going to be crap. The cycle has to be cut open by the build tool somehow, and builds may or may not work reliably as a result. It is better to avoid it.