[bjourne]

I've been using WAF for ages so naturally I wonder how this system compares to WAF? My experience with build systems is that they all get the easy parts rights. You can compile C and C++ code and they successfully scan header files for dependencies. But FEW get the hard parts rights. E.g., compiling LaTeX with multiple figures, custom fonts and classes, and multiple bib files. It requires correctly interfacing with pdfatex which is a complete PITA as it spews intermediate files everywhere and puts constraints on the current directory. Most build tools can't.

What I want in a build tool is universality. Sometimes a whole directory tree is the dependency of a target. Sometimes it's an url and the build tool should correctly download and cache that url. Sometimes the pre-requisite is training an ML model.

[rwmj]

I wrote an experimental make replacement some years ago that understands that not every target is a file. eg. You can have targets be a remote URL (for an action of uploading to a fileserver).

http://git.annexia.org/?p=goals.git;a=summary

http://oirase.annexia.org/2020-02-rjones-goals-tech-talk.mp4

[ladams]

latexrun does a pretty reasonable job with LaTeX files, and only runs when needed, etc. Would be nice to have this integrated into a build system for plots, data generation, etc.

[johnny22]

is it impossible to fix that issue in pdflatex?

[bjourne]

My point is that build systems must be able to deal with tools with insanely stupid interfaces like pdflatex. Btw, WAF's strategy of dealing with pdflatex is to rerun the command "until output files stop changing". That's how dumb it is.

[FraaJad]

what is WAF?