[everheardofc]

>Using make, you can standardise a lot of this. If you set up a coding standard that after you clone a repo, "make dep" should grab anything the project requires, then developers don't initially need to know whether that's calling out to npm or composer or pip or whatever - it's just "working".

In my experience you will end up with a dozen coding "standards" and project structures. Especially in C and C++ where header dependencies have to be generated by the compiler even the most basic makefile will take you at least an hour to create if you already have experience in making makefiles.

[ealexhudson]

Comes down to how you enforce it. To be clear, I'm not talking about mediating the build in Make unless that's the best tool for the job. On a C project I would use cmake, but within this system I'd run it out of a Makefile at a top level, so the person pulling it can just run 'make build'.

The point is to have a known starting place, so that when you pull down a new project you don't have to spend ages reading about how it works.

Even if you can't grab the deps automatically, doing 'make build' and it saying "Hey, you don't have cmake and a bunch of other things you need, but go look at http://whatever.. to set yourself up" is a much better experience.