I'm not sure I understand the value of this project at all.
He says that maintaining a monolithic Makefile doesn't scale, but that seems unlikely considering how far BSD stretches Makefiles for it's ports system. Sure, Make has some rough edges, but I don't see how Javascript is possibly preferable for gluing together build processes.
The fundamental problem here is that "task based build system" is a silly idea. Make isn't a programming language, you don't define function names. Make is a dependency graph with files for nodes and command lines for edges. We already have a system for "tasks": stick things in ./script or add things to PATH!
By all means, make a metapackage for your test, lint, etc scripts, but define your concatonation like this:
out/foo.js: banner src/foo.js
cat $^ > $@
And generalize your minification using a pattern rule, here's ours:
%.min.js: %.js
$(yui) --type js --nomunge < $< > $@
Then add in a gzipping rule:
%.gz: %
gzip --best < $< > $@
You could trivially stick that sort of thing into `grunt.mk`...
And here's how you'd use that:
include grunt.mk
my-app.min.js.gz: my-app.min.js
my-app.min.js: $(find src -name '*.js')
That said, sometimes it is nice to add some "tasks" for discoverability & encouraging their usage:
include grunt.mk
.PHONY: all lint test
all: my-app.min.js.gz lint test
my-app.min.js.gz: my-app.min.js
my-app.min.js: $(find src -name '*.js')
test:
./test/run
lint:
./script/lint src
What if you want to run a subset of tests? Or lint with particular flags? Run a shell command like this one:
$ grep test: -A1 Makefile
Then copy paste and edit the output!
Simpler is better.
He says that maintaining a monolithic Makefile doesn't scale, but that seems unlikely considering how far BSD stretches Makefiles for it's ports system. Sure, Make has some rough edges, but I don't see how Javascript is possibly preferable for gluing together build processes.
The fundamental problem here is that "task based build system" is a silly idea. Make isn't a programming language, you don't define function names. Make is a dependency graph with files for nodes and command lines for edges. We already have a system for "tasks": stick things in ./script or add things to PATH!
By all means, make a metapackage for your test, lint, etc scripts, but define your concatonation like this:
And generalize your minification using a pattern rule, here's ours: Then add in a gzipping rule: You could trivially stick that sort of thing into `grunt.mk`...And here's how you'd use that:
That said, sometimes it is nice to add some "tasks" for discoverability & encouraging their usage: What if you want to run a subset of tests? Or lint with particular flags? Run a shell command like this one: Then copy paste and edit the output!Simpler is better.