Make is terribly undervalued as a tool outside of compiling and linking programs.

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@jkreeftmeijer I think in community essen shows that you can (ab-)use differently.

But honestly, I just don't see applicability.

@jonn My comment was mostly about putting single-line commands in Makefiles instead of running them through Rake or having a directory of executable bash files.

It’s all in one place, and without any extra dependencies to manage.

@jkreeftmeijer interesting! It's been a while since I had to work on "stateful" projects, there `make` seems to be justified. Like instead of `provisionLocalDatabase.sh` one can have `make data` that will take care of everything like bootstrapping local DB, making users, etc.

The closest similar use-case I am facing daily is to start long-running interactive programs or monitors. Sadly, `make` isn't quite applicable here, since the programs are long-running, so I use `shmux` over shell scripts in `tasks/` subdirectory: git.sr.ht/~jonn/shmux/tree/mas

In fact, I use to do non-technical stuff too, like run three windows of or set up windows with reporting.

@jonn Ah, shmux looks cool indeed! Yeah, using make breaks down very fast if the task becomes more complex, like long running tasks or even just accepting arguments. 😅

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