Universal build command in the MBT spec file about mbt HOT 3 CLOSED

Hello, sorry it toke me a while to reply 😅

I am aware of the user defined commands, except for the optional os property in them. But I think having it with the build main command would be more appropriate when it comes to how we think of the development and build process in general.

That is that I think it's more correct to have a separation between the main build command which could be responsible for compiling the code and installing any required dependencies, from user defined ones which could contain other utilities such as a test command for example.

Also using the user defined commands could create an inconstancy in using the build command, for example, in the case of a custom build command being passed on a Linux platform for example, it could mean defining two build commands and then alternating between them depending on the platform, potentially running something as mbt run-in xxxx build or mbt run-in xxxx build-custom, instead of just running mbt build xxxx and having MBT figure out what to run based on the platform.

Which is why I think having the current build but with a default option could be better than deprecating it in favor of user defined commands. What do you think?

from mbt.

Yeah, thanks. Makes sense and I'm convinced that we should do this :-)

from mbt.

Good question. This facility is currently not available in build xxx commands. However, we introduced a user defined commands feature that has this feature.
It's not well documented at the moment, but you will get the gist of it here:
https://github.com/mbtproject/mbt#user-defined-commands

You basically run it like this:
run-in diff|branch|head|local|pr|commit --command <command name>

User defined commands have a property called os where you can optionally specify os restrictions.
e.g.

commands:
  hello:
    cmd: echo
    args: [hello]
    os: [darwin, linux]

We would like to port this functionality to build command as well. Alternatively, if everyone is finding user defined commands as a more flexible way to define them, we could start deprecating build command.

from mbt.