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[deadalnix]

On Saturday, 23 February 2013 at 10:21:59 UTC, Sönke Ludwig wrote:
> Am 23.02.2013 10:20, schrieb SomeDude:
>> On Sunday, 17 February 2013 at 08:02:41 UTC, Sönke Ludwig 
>> wrote:
>>> To me the most interesting open question is this: Do we 
>>> actually gain
>>> from programmatic support for the build description, or does 
>>> it suffice
>>> to have a good purely descriptive system? If the former 
>>> should be true
>>> for more than 1% of the cases, that would definitely be a 
>>> good argument
>>> against pure data.
>> 
>> Well, in the Java world, there is ant. It does the trick, but 
>> it's quite
>> ugly.
>
> And it also does the really strange thing to actually build up a
> procedural build description in a declarative (+ugly) language. 
> That's
> definitely not what I have in mind - what I want is really a 
> pure
> /description/ of the system, from which the build steps (or 
> anything
> else) can be inferred.
>

In my experience, this ends up with an explosion of plugins or 
special cases to handle some tricks in the build. At the end, you 
ends up having some kind of programming language, but horribly 
designed.

I don't think both contradict themselves, as you can provide 
descriptive definition via several declaration with known names. 
You can also provide hooks or way to create plugins from withing 
the script definition. That were they belongs if you don't want 
user to download 10 bazillions plugins in addition to the build 
system.