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Re:Ask HN: What overlooked class of tools should a self-taug... by RangerScience on Thursday May 16, 2019 @07:44PM (#19934624)
> common commands

Oh absolutely. It's fantastic for that. Our build pipeline actually relies on that; every project has a "release" target that is basically for the CI to use.

> Make includes

Yeah, I looked into that, and I think I had the same conclusion.

> scripts called from the Makefile

That's what I'm thinking is the way to level up this kind of system. Although then, why have `make init` instead of just `./bin/init` ?

Re:Ask HN: What overlooked class of tools should a self-taug... by aequitas on Friday May 17, 2019 @09:21AM (#19939302)
The biggest reason I use Make is the dependency resolving.

In the `make init` example. It doesn't matter how many intermediate steps are involved `init` is the end-state I want to achieve. So in most of my Makefiles the `init` target will fan-out into requirements as wide and deep as it needs, including running apt to install missing system dependencies. But then the good part. If a dependency is already fulfilled Make won't have to run it again. Although sometimes its hard or clunky to convert some dependencies into 'files' so Make can do its dependency resolving work properly.