Comments on: Nobody Cares About Your Build

By: kit

kit — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 04:31:40 +0000

@tan: I know Ruby is well-loved by many, and they’re welcome to it, but for my money, it’s the scripting language’s equivalent of a head-final language (like, oh, say, Japanese in the natural language domain), which, as a speaker of a head-initial language (English), is still hard for me to grasp. It’s inside-out to me, though after living in Japan I’ve managed to internalize Japanese syntax as natural. Not so Ruby, yet.

That’s my incoherent 2¢

By: Owen

Owen — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 03:45:12 +0000

I hadn’t. While I have nothing against using tools written in language A to build software in language B, using ruby *as a build language* grates, both on my brain and on my eyes. The syntax is… not great. The best thing I can say about

desc ‘All those implementation details’
define ‘teh-impl’ do
compile.with AXIS_OF_WS, OPENJPA
compile { open_jpa_enhance }
package :jar
end

is that it’s terser than the equivalent maven configuration; it’s not particularly clearer.

In return, have you looked at scons?

By: Tan Quach

Tan Quach — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 02:00:07 +0000

Have you seen buildr?

http://incubator.apache.org/buildr/

By: Owen

Owen — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 03:07:59 +0000

Either an active community or a large body of incidental documentation. There’s no large community around make(1) any more, but there are so many bits of “hey, I figured out how to do (task X) in my Makefile” documentation out on the web that it makes up for it.

Though… if you have a complex build, it’s probably worth simplifying it - very few of the “complex” builds I’ve encountered have actually needed the complication; most were poorly-factored and could’ve been broken down into several stages for easier maintenance.

By: Andrew Binstock

Andrew Binstock — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 22:23:25 +0000

Nicely done. I would add that the tool must have an active community. When you’re deep in a complex build, it’s nice–sometimes crucial–to be able to communicate with other users about how they have solved build problems you’re facing.

By: Owen

Owen — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 04:15:13 +0000

@idcmp: I was thinking more about building, say, two JARs from one src/ directory by way of clever include/exclude filters, as a project we both know used to do. “The same source tree” is pretty vague, though, and I definitely have no problem with the same code living in src-for-a and src-for-b directories that are built simultaneously. I’d just be inclined to write two builds.

By: idcmp

idcmp — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 01:05:18 +0000

I still think “one source tree per product” should be driven more by release cycles than products. If products A and B are built and released by the same team at the same time, then there’s little harm in them living together; especially if a team is resource constrained and could better use the time elsewhere.