[zaptheimpaler]

I haven't worked in the industry for very long. Could someone explain why build processes tend to get so complicated? I have some intuition about the steps that a build process takes being complicated, but it seems to me that the process itself would be linear i.e

A + Config -> B -> C -> D -> E -> Compiled

Maybe you could have decision points in the compilation flow depending on config parameters, system parameters, making it a tree, but I don't see why a build tool couldn't make those decisions based on the configuration provided. Essentially, I envision a build tool that takes in a huge number of arguments (maybe reads them from an XML/JSON/whatever config file) with sane sets of defaults for each.

(Forgive me if all this seems naive, it most likely is. I want to know why.)

[lmm]

>Essentially, I envision a build tool that takes in a huge number of arguments (maybe reads them from an XML/JSON/whatever config file) with sane sets of defaults for each.

That's pretty much how maven works. A typical java project will have an xml file listing its name and version, the names and versions of all its dependencies, a scm URL for tagging releases and that's basically it. The problem is people who have got used to having all the freedom of calling arbitrary shell programs at any point in the build process; it's very easy to accrete a series of small hacks ("oh I'll just sed this file here to fix that") that add up to something incomprehensible.