[vidarh]

I agree. I increasingly use makefiles with a small set of common targets. I know I can do "make build" in all my repos, whether they're C or Ruby and whether they're packaged as a docker container or directly. I know I can do "make run". I know if they're in a container I can do "make cli" to get a shell inside that container, and so on.

The Makefile then acts as documentation of exactly what to do. All of the setup stuff that people often put in a README is right there.

All of the complex stuff gets put in other tools or separate scripts. But there's probably going to be a make target that tells people which tool and where to look if they need to change it, or that'll let them run it without having to know the details.