[bluejekyll]

One of the reasons I know I still rely on Make instead of Just, is about how available make is, and pretty much any tool (be it a new implementation of make in Rust or Just) will have to deal with the fact that make is already a default on so many systems.

That makes make a great entry point for any project. Does anyone have a general suggestion about how to work around this? The goal being, sync a project and not need to install anything to get going. One thing I do sometimes is to use make as the entry point, and it has an init target to install the necessary tools to get going (depends on who I know to be the target audience).

[berkes]

This sounds like what I do: Makefile with distinct steps: install, build, test, lint, deploy. Those steps call underlying tools, depending on the platform, framework, language.

E.g. in one project it will install rbenv, bundle, npm, yarn etc. Call Rake, npx, that odd docker wrapper, etc. Or deploy with git in one project and through capistrano or ansible in another.

As a dev, in daily mode, all you need is 'make lint && make test && make deploy'. All the underlying tools and their intricacies are only needed when it fails or when you want to change stuff.

[bluejekyll]

Yeah. Exactly. I do this when I think there will be users who don’t already have all the dev tools installed, and I don’t want them to have to download and install everything.

[andoriyu]

yeah, until you meet the system with different make, and now you have to install GNU/Make.