I asked some questions on slack related to this, and in case anyone else was confused like me thinking tools.build is a new framework for managing build tasks, that does not seem the be intent.
tools.build is a helper lib to write programs that make artifacts such as Jars or Uberjars. It competes with things like depstar in that sense.
Tasks are still meant to be managed by deps.edn (tools.deps) and the Clojure CLI by having tasks be Clojure programs that are invokable as either -X, -T or -M, and the idea is you would orchestrate them with another tool like make, a shell command or script, babashka task runner, npm scripts, just etc.
This means that any Clojure program can be a "task". All you need to add a new task to a project is define an alias for it in the project deps.edn.
Now one caveat is depending on the type of program the task is, you might need to call the alias with either -X, -T or -M option:
Ideally all Clojure programs that implement a task move to rely on exec-fns, and thus would be called with -T or -X, which will eventually allow you to chain tasks together where the return of the first task exec-fn will be passed to the next task's exec-fn, so you can compose tasks and run them consecutively from the clojure CLI.
So tools.build is just a lib that you can use to help you write tasks (which are just normal Clojure programs), but it is itself a set of exec-fns tasks which you can use directly as an alias as well:
tools.build is a helper lib to write programs that make artifacts such as Jars or Uberjars. It competes with things like depstar in that sense.
Tasks are still meant to be managed by deps.edn (tools.deps) and the Clojure CLI by having tasks be Clojure programs that are invokable as either -X, -T or -M, and the idea is you would orchestrate them with another tool like make, a shell command or script, babashka task runner, npm scripts, just etc.
This means that any Clojure program can be a "task". All you need to add a new task to a project is define an alias for it in the project deps.edn.
Now one caveat is depending on the type of program the task is, you might need to call the alias with either -X, -T or -M option:
Ideally all Clojure programs that implement a task move to rely on exec-fns, and thus would be called with -T or -X, which will eventually allow you to chain tasks together where the return of the first task exec-fn will be passed to the next task's exec-fn, so you can compose tasks and run them consecutively from the clojure CLI.So tools.build is just a lib that you can use to help you write tasks (which are just normal Clojure programs), but it is itself a set of exec-fns tasks which you can use directly as an alias as well:
with alias as: