mistercow on Show HN: Makedown – A Markdown powered Makefile alternative

Comment on Show HN: Makedown – A Markdown powered Makefile alternative parent

It’s interesting because this is the point of make, but it seems really common for make alternatives to miss this.

And that’s frustrating, because the place where a make alternative could really shine is not in making the syntax for specifying scripts nicer, but in figuring out how to design the dependency APIs so that you aren’t almost guaranteed to get them wrong in subtle ways.

mkesper 1y

Great point. My take is that most inexperienced people know make only as a bundle of shell scripts with semi-nice unification (not really nice because you just don't have an easy way to pass arguments to your scripts and no automatic help etc.).

timzOP1y

Added support for dependency between commands. So one can now write:

    # [clean]() Clean build directory

    ```bash
    rm -rf ./build
    ```    

    # [format]() Format the source code

    ```bash
    npx prettier --write .
    ```

    # [build](clean format) Build the project

    ```bash
    npm run build
    ```

    # [deploy](build) Deploy to surge.sh

    ```bash
    surge ./build my-project.surge.sh
    ```

This doesn't include file time modification between files as in Makefile.

Thank you for feature suggestion.

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