[dissent]

One issue I don't hear mentioned often is reuse.

A task runner's tasks could be arbitrarily complicated, pulling in all sorts of dependencies of their own. This is less true for the traditional compile targets make was designed for.

Because the things we do in a Makefile are pretty much always project local and don't get reused, it limits how much heavy lifting these tasks are likely to do for us. Whereas if you built your our CLI in Python with Click or something, you would be able to make it a development dependency of your project. You can afford to invest in those tasks more because they'll be reused.

The Just command runner has the same problem, but at least it's designed to be a task runner.

[kristjansson]

Build a CLI / complex task as part of your project, then invoke it via make. This pattern is much more about documenting and composing steps than implementing them

[dissent]

Why invoke it via make when it can invoke itself? It's just another dependency that's not needed in this scenario.

[nrclark]

Make is leaner and more agile than a custom CLI. It takes no time to get started, and there is no boilerplate. Removing or adding steps is trivial, running shell commands is trivial, and hooking into the dependency graph is trivial. Parallelism is built-in, as is dependency resolution. Tab-completion is standard on most Linux distros.

It's also better from an architectural separation perspective. Your custom CLI will have custom commands and flags, and probably will need to be called in some standardized way. Make is very good at calling your toolchain / build-system (whatever that might be) with the exact arguments that you want. And things like "make all" or "make clean" are muscle-memory for hundreds of thousands of developers.

Why mix your custom tooling with the task of standardizing an entry point?

I've had really great success over the years with the pattern of "some build system or another (cmake, bazel, autotools, etc) orchestrated by a top-level Makefile." It's simple, portable, and flexible. What's not to like, other than ugly syntax?

[dissent]

I know a lot of developers who agree with you.

But how is make dependency free? You need to install make. Which version? GNU make, or FreeBSD make? What platform are you installing it on? What version? In my team we had to get all our devs to manually upgrade from 3 to 4 as we were using modern make features to make it a nicer task runner.

These are all things you've already had to deal with in the custom CLI, which is also a perfectly good entry point. You also have a lot more control of command line arguments, rather than just make targets ("just" has also added this as a feature)