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A comment on The sad state of sysadmin in the age of containers (2015). Parent comment

Re:The sad state of sysadmin in the age of containers (2015) by avar on Wednesday May 16, 2018 @03:01PM (#17085396)
You'd use Python as the language for the recipe that turns (in this example) a given .c file into a .o file, while leaving the Makefile to do what it's good at, declaring the DAG dependency tree needed to incrementally build it.

The point is that people conflate these two things. They open some random Makefile and see that it's mostly doing stuff with shellscripts, and think "oh I should do this all in Python", and then write some monstrosity that doesn't make a dependency DAG and thus can't run in parallel or be easily understood.

Instead they should have split the actual logic they found in shellscripts in to Python scripts the Makefile invokes.

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Re:The sad state of sysadmin in the age of containers (2015) by colanderman on Wednesday May 16, 2018 @03:05PM (#17085439)
Nevermind, I misread you. I missed "rule" where you said "beginning of every Makefile rule". (I thought you were suggesting just having the default rule run some enormous Python script, which I've unfortunately seen before.)
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