On: Don’t use environment variables for configuration

[nyanpasu64]

IMO, the author is writing from the perspective of Meson, a command line build tool used by individuals that takes arguments and caches them in a per-project file, whereas most of the negative replies are commenting from the perspective of sysadmins deploying software into homogeneous servers or Docker containers. Would make be a better program if MAKEFLAGS was not an environment variable? (IDK.) Would Git be a better program if the project directory was passed as an argument rather than as inherited state (the cwd)? (IDK.) Would less or nano be a better program if file paths were passed in as environment variables rather than arguments? (no.)

[k_ → nyanpasu64]

> Would Git be a better program if the project directory was passed as an argument rather than as inherited state (the cwd)? (IDK.)

Well, it can do both :) `--git-dir=<path>` will let you run git for another project directory

[Aeolun → nyanpasu64]

> a command line build tool used by individuals that takes arguments and caches them in a per-project file

That is literally one of the worst ideas I’ve ever heard of. And I’ve heard many bad ideas recently.

[maccard → Aeolun]

What's the alternative? That's how make, cmake, msbuild, ninja,docker, and basically every other build tool I'm aware of works

[nyanpasu64 → maccard]

CMake does that and is a truly demented implementation, mixing user-specified initial state (supplied the first time you run CMake and carried on to future argument-less invocations), derived state, and cached compiler locations and versions in a single CMakeCache.txt file. Edit CMakeLists.txt? Time to delete CMakeCache.txt! Upgrade your compiler? Time to delete CMakeCache.txt!

I haven't used Meson all that much, but I recall it's a bit better than CMake but I still ran into a similar issue at one point.

[Aeolun → maccard]

You take the arguments every time? Or you read them from a configuration file.

But you do not automatically add them to the configuration file unless the user explicitly tells you to do so.

[nikisweeting → maccard]

Docker doesn't do that. You can create a .env file, but it only reads the options you give it, Docker never writes/caches to that file.

[haolez → maccard]

Make doesn't work like that.

[orthecreedence → haolez]

Wait, make has a global state? I was under the impression most make targets are stored somewhere in the project itself (like a build/ directory). I think this is a fine approach, BTW. I think global state should be avoided unless necessary.

[haolez → orthecreedence]

Make does what you tell it to do. While some projects have the setup that you've described, many others do not. Make will only check the timestamps of the generated assets and decide to build (or not) based on that.