Always grateful when 'make' just works, even if it's a wrapper around a bunch of baroque nonsense, especially when it's a wrapper around a bunch of baroque nonsense.

I guess I'm old, but “clone, build in one step, install in one step” should be the baseline minimum standard of codebase ergonomics.

I mean, you switched to aardvark/gruntmaven because bazel ninja womble didn't integrate well with chumbawumba sconsburgler and a fraggle zumba donkastonk pipeline wouldn't support reflocolative combobulates? Great. Nobody should have to give a shit about that to build your software. They should be able to type 'make' and watch and if that breaks it’s a bug.

More seriously, here is a true fact: if you can’t get from a bare, minimal-install machine to “ready to build” in one step, then you don’t know what your dependencies really are. If you can’t get from “ready to build” to a working binary in one step, then you don’t know what your build process really is.

You might not care! But if the day comes that you suddenly do need to care a lot, whether for a new contributor or a red hot CVE, learning will be very difficult.