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by meddlepal 3213 days ago
I tried this approach. It never works in the long run. The Python developers wanted Make for the few commands they needed in their projects. The JVM folks had Gradle. The Python folks refused to learn Gradle (because of some argument like: rah rah rah JVM tools hard; Make easy! Make all you need. If Make isn't enough your language is garbage).

So the JVM folks created a crappy Makefile that accomplished some of the basic stuff to appease the Pythonistas. Meanwhile the JVM folks continued to use Gradle directly and the Python folks who had to work on the JVM projects got a shittier experience through the Makefile. As new tasks were added to build process the JVM folks would just write custom Gradle tasks to accomplish the job which would drive the Python folks nuts because they wanted shell scripts or make targets invoking shell scripts or whatever.

My only take away from this experience was developer tooling sucks and there is no one size fits all approach to build systems. Try to stick to a convention within an ecosystem (e.g. all JVM projects should use one of Gradle/Maven/Sbt), but don't try and get cute with making stuff more common than it has to be.
1 comments
Chris2048 3213 days ago
You say the Pythonistas refused to use Gradle, but it also seems the JVM peeps refused to let go of it?

Isn't that the problem? Isn't Make more general than Gradle? If the project was primarily JVM, why couldn't the Pythonistas be forced to use whatever build system was mandated?

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meddlepal 3213 days ago
You'd have to reinvent a lot of wheels to replicate what Gradle (or Maven) does. For example dependency management, env setup and packaging. It would be similar to asking a Python developer to give up pip, setup/disttools and maybe virtualenv. In the end you want productive devs. Stripping away the tools they are productive with is counterproductive.
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Chris2048 3213 days ago
But surely these are targets for make?

e.g a pip target that builds a python dep folder. You can do the same for Java with Apache Ivy.

Is Gradle not a make like system with a lot of JVM-specific functionality built in?

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