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Show HN: Makex Automation Tool

https://meta.company/

Hi Everyone!

Makex is a better build/automation tool. It was conceived about two weeks ago.

It's already useful, and it’s completely replacing all of our Makefiles, among other internal build files and scripts... It builds and deploys itself entirely.

Makex was produced after decades of experience with Make/Makefiles and numerous other build/automation/run tooling…

Makefiles are ugly, hard to produce, understand and configure. They are passable for the simplest of cases. GNU Make is gate-keeped and static, and that may be a good thing, but it's also hard on everyone.

At the other end of the spectrum, Bazel has high overhead and is high complexity. It's overkill. Complex rules often obscure what actions are used to produce what outputs in what path. Bazel takes python and makes it extremely implicit.

Makex is intended for a wide range of multi-platform workflows. It uses several performance tricks with the goal of supporting huge repositories. There's a lot going on under the hood... It's about 10 KLOC at the moment.

It works on Linux, but should work in any POSIX/Unix-compatible environment.

It's early, and there'll be more features and releases for various platforms (including packages and binaries).

Take a look/test, and let me know what you think.

Thanks!

( 8 comments | 3 points | on HN )
Re:Show HN: Makex Automation Tool by mdaniel on Thursday February 01, 2024 @01:40PM (#39219527)
your thing is missing any licensing information, making it almost guaranteed to be a non-starter for any such intended audience, both control-f "license" and, bizarrely enough, a 404 file reference in your own build script https://hg.sr.ht/~metacompany/makex/browse/python/pyproject....

relevant: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29074406 (Facebook Stole Our Name and Livelihood (November 1, 2021 — 386 points, 188 comments))

Re:Show HN: Makex Automation Tool by nateskulic on Thursday February 01, 2024 @01:46PM (#39219592)
Feel free to use it. It's supposed to be pervasive.

License will be published soon, but we're deciding on things. That takes time and thought.

Love to hear your opinions.

Thanks!

Re:Show HN: Makex Automation Tool by thecowgoes on Thursday February 01, 2024 @02:30PM (#39220136)
Neat.

When do you plan to support Windows?

Re:Show HN: Makex Automation Tool by nateskulic on Thursday February 01, 2024 @02:54PM (#39220449)
Should have some basic support within a couple months when I get time... It'll take some work... We have a bunch of things that either need to be built on Windows or [cross-platform] for Windows. It's not a high priority at the moment.

We'll have binaries/exes too, so one doesn't have to install Python.

Re:Show HN: Makex Automation Tool by friendlynokill on Thursday February 01, 2024 @10:38PM (#39224717)
Have you given up on suing Facebook? I find it pretty hard to not associate the term Meta with Facebook these days.
Re:Show HN: Makex Automation Tool by nateskulic on Friday February 02, 2024 @12:15AM (#39225320)
And that's called confusion.

Challenging a company like Facebook in courts costs millions and years. There's no such thing as pro-bono here.

Not done with them yet. We have some plans.

Re:Show HN: Makex Automation Tool by nateskulic on Friday February 02, 2024 @12:41AM (#39225471)
All: somehow the URL changed without any notice... See https://meta.company/go/makex/ until it's fixed.
Re:Show HN: Makex Automation Tool by dang on Friday February 02, 2024 @01:36AM (#39225762)
It's because the page contains this:

  <link rel="canonical" href="/go/makex/index.html" />
Our software switches to canonical URLs when it finds one. I'll fix it above on this post.