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In my opinion, unless if you need its ability to figure out when something should rebuild or potentially if you already use it, Make is not the right tool for the job. You should capture your pipeline jobs in scripts or similar, but Make just adds another language for developers to learn on top of everything. Make is not a simple script runner.

I maintained a Javascript project that used Make and it just turned into a mess. We simply changed all of our `make some-job` jobs into `./scripts/some-job.sh` and not only was the code much nicer, less experienced developers were suddenly more comfortable making changes to scripts. We didn't really need Make to figure out when to rebuild anything, all of our tools already had caching.



Make is definitely just my personal preference. If using bash scripts, Just, Taskfile or something similar works better for you then by all means use it.

The main argument I wanted to make is that it works very well to just use GitHub actions to execute your tool of choice.


This is why I've become a huge fan of Just, which is just a command runner, not a build caching system or anything.

It allows you to define a central interface into your project (largely what I find people justify using Make for), but smoothes out so many of the weird little bumps you run into from "using Make wrong."

Plus, you can an any point just drop into running a script in a different language as your command, so it basically "supports bash scripts" too.

https://github.com/casey/just




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