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Who can't read a Makefile? Who can't at least read the output of make -n? It's terrifying to me that you're suggesting that people can't and don't.

It's not even a security thing. I've had poorly-written Makefiles that would have blown things away thanks to an unset variable on a certain platform, for example.



> Who can't read a Makefile? Who can't at least read the output of make -n? It's terrifying to me that you're suggesting that people can't and don't.

Can I read a Makefile? Sure. But 90%+ of Makefiles these days are 12000 line automatically generated monstrosities. It's not worth my time to bother opening the Makefile in a text editor in case it isn't, and I'd be amazed if many people did.

make -n you can do I guess. But unless you're also auditing all the source code I'm not sure there's a lot of value in it.

> It's not even a security thing. I've had poorly-written Makefiles that would have blown things away thanks to an unset variable on a certain platform, for example.

Yep. Maven doesn't do that.




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