Thanks for the pointer! Very interesting. I actually may end up doing a prototype and see how far I can get.

I usually capture all my development-time “automation” in Make and Ansible files. I also use makefiles to provide a consisent set of commands for the CI/CD pipelines to work w/ in case different projects use different build tools. That way CI/CD only needs to know about make build, make test, make package, … instead of Gradle/Maven/… specific commands.

Most of the times, the makefiles are quite simple and don’t need much comments. However, there are times that’s not the case and hence the need to write a line of comment on particular targets and variables.

Can you provide what you mean by check the environment, and why you’d need to do that before anything else?

One recent example is a makefile (in a subproject), w/ a dozen of targets to provision machines and run Ansible playbooks. Almost all the targets need at least a few variables to be set. Additionally, I needed any fresh invocation to clean the “build” directory before starting the work.

At first, I tried capturing those variables w/ a bunch of ifeqs, shells and defines. However, I wasn’t satisfied w/ the results for a couple of reasons:

1. Subjectively speaking, it didn’t turn out as nice and easy-to-read as I wanted it to.
2. I had to replicate my (admittedly simple) clean target as a shell command at the top of the file.

Then I tried capturing that in a target using bmakelib.error-if-blank and bmakelib.default-if-blank as below.

##############

.PHONY : ensure-variables

ensure-variables : bmakelib.error-if-blank( VAR1 VAR2 )
ensure-variables : bmakelib.default-if-blank( VAR3,foo )

##############

.PHONY : ansible.run-playbook1

ansible.run-playbook1 : ensure-variables cleanup-residue | $(ansible.venv)
ansible.run-playbook1 : 
	...

##############

.PHONY : ansible.run-playbook2

ansible.run-playbook2 : ensure-variables cleanup-residue | $(ansible.venv)
ansible.run-playbook2 : 
	...

##############

But this was not DRY as I had to repeat myself.

That’s why I thought there may be a better way of doing this which led me to the manual and then the method I describe in the post.

running specific targets or rules unconditionally can lead to trouble later as your Makefile grows up

That is true! My concern is that when the number of targets which don’t need that initialisation grows I may have to rethink my approach.

I’ll keep this thread posted of how this pans out as the makefile scales.

Even though I’ve been writing GNU Makefiles for decades, I still am learning new stuff constantly, so if someone has better, different ways, I’m certainly up for studying them.

Love the attitude! I’m on the same boat. I could have just kept doing what I already knew but I thought a bit of manual reading is going to be well worth it.

That’s a great starting point - and a good read anyways!

Thanks 🙏

Agree w/ you re trust.

Thanks. At least I’ve got a few clues to look for when auditing such code.

I didn’t like the capitalised names so configured xdg to use all lowercase letters. That’s why ~/opt fits in pretty nicely.

You’ve got a point re ~/.local/opt but I personally like the idea of having the important bits right in my home dir. Here’s my layout (which I’m quite used to now after all these years):

$ ls ~
bin  
desktop  
doc  
downloads  
mnt  
music  
opt 
pictures  
public  
src  
templates  
tmp  
videos  
workspace

where

• bin is just a bunch of symlinks to frequently used apps from opt
• src is where i keep clones of repos (but I don’t do work in src)
• workspace is a where I do my work on git worktrees (based off src)

Thanks! So much for my reading skills/attention span 😂

Which Debian version is it based on?

Something that I’ll definitely keep an eye on. Thanks for sharing!

RE Go: Others have already mentioned the right way, thought I’d personally prefer ~/opt/go over what was suggested.

RE Perl: To instruct Perl to install to another directory, for example to ~/opt/perl5, put the following lines somewhere in your bash init files.

export PERL5LIB="$HOME/opt/perl5/lib/perl5${PERL5LIB:+:${PERL5LIB}}"
export PERL_LOCAL_LIB_ROOT="$HOME/opt/perl5${PERL_LOCAL_LIB_ROOT:+:${PERL_LOCAL_LIB_ROOT}}"
export PERL_MB_OPT="--install_base \"$HOME/opt/perl5\""
export PERL_MM_OPT="INSTALL_BASE=$HOME/opt/perl5"
export PATH="$HOME/opt/perl5/bin${PATH:+:${PATH}}"

Though you need to re-install the Perl packages you had previously installed.

First off, I was ready to close the tab at the slightest suggestion of using Velocity as a metric. That didn’t happen 🙂

I like the idea that metrics should be contained and sustainable. Though I don’t agree w/ the suggested metrics.

In general, it seems they are all designed around the process and not the product. In particular, there’s no mention of the “value unlocked” in each sprint: it’s an important one for an Agile team as it holds Product accountable to understanding of what is the $$$ value of the team’s effort.

The suggested set, to my mind, is formed around the idea of a feature factory line and its efficiency (assuming it is measurable.) It leaves out the “meaning” of what the team achieve w/ that efficiency.

My 2 cents.

Good read nonetheless 👍 Got me thinking about this intriguing topic after a few years.

This is fantastic! 👏

I use Perl one-liners for record and text processing a lot and this will be definitely something I will keep coming back to - I’ve already learned a trick from “Context Matching” (9) 🙂

Uh, I’m not sure I understand what you mean.

I see.

So what do you think would help w/ this particular challenge? What kinds of tools/facilities would help counter that?

Off the top of my head, do you think

• The sign up process should be more rigorous?
• The first couple of posts/comments by new users should be verified by the mods?
• Mods should be notified of posts/comments w/ poor score?

cc @PrettyFlyForAFatGuy@lemmy.ml

Interesting topic - I’ve seen it surface up a few times recently.

I’ve never been a mod anywhere so I can’t accurately think what workflows/tools a mod needs to be satisfied w/ their, well, mod’ing.

For the sake of my education at least, can you elaborate what do you consider decent moderation tools/workflows? What gaps do you see between that and Lemmy?

PS: I genuinely want to understand this topic better but your post doesn’t provide any details. 😅

I wonder why all the down-votes!? The linked article was a good read IMO. What did I miss here?

The GNU GPL is not Mr. Nice Guy. It says no to some of the things that people sometimes want to do. There are users who say that this is a bad thing—that the GPL “excludes” some proprietary software developers who “need to be brought into the free software community.”

But we are not excluding them from our community; they are choosing not to enter. Their decision to make software proprietary is a decision to stay out of our community. Being in our community means joining in cooperation with us; we cannot “bring them into our community” if they don’t want to join.