prior-art.md

Inspiration

We considered several systems. At the heart of them there's a method to declare a rule that takes some set of inputs, runs a shell script or other executable and creates some output. Rules can be composed together. An output from one rule can be used as the input to others

Anaconda

You provide a build.sh and/or build.bat

mkdir -p $PREFIX/bin
cp $RECIPE_DIR/my_script_with_recipe.sh $PREFIX/bin/super-cool-script.sh

Anything you write to $PREFIX is in the conda package.

Bazel

[https://docs.bazel.build/versions/master/be/general.html#genrule]

genrule(
    name = "foo",
    srcs = [],
    outs = ["foo.h"],
    cmd = "./$(location create_foo.pl) > \"$@\"",
    tools = ["create_foo.pl"],
)

Nix

[https://nixos.org/nixos/nix-pills/index.html]

A nix deriviation called simple that compiles a C executable

with (import <nixpkgs> {});
derivation {
  name = "simple";
  builder = "${bash}/bin/bash";
  args = [ ./simple_builder.sh ];
  inherit gcc coreutils;
  src = ./simple.c;
  system = builtins.currentSystem;
}

A builder is anything that can be executed in this example note that it's just a bash script. Anything it puts in the $out directory is considered the results of the step

This derivation depends on $gcc, $bash those will be built before this derivation is run. The paths are set to where the results of the depedencies are in the store.

Note that the "builder" is just a shell script

export PATH="$coreutils/bin:$gcc/bin"
mkdir $out
gcc -o $out/simple $src

GitHub Actions

Dosen't have the notion of composability of build results, it's very imperative. But you can use create an action which is a gitrepo with some javascript, a yaml file and possibly a Dockerfile. One action can refer to another action by org/repo@git-ref name.

They also have a matrix strategy which runs the action for various platforms.

on: push
jobs:
  test:
    strategy:
      matrix:
        platform: [ubuntu-latest, macos-latest, windows-latest]
    runs-on: ${{ matrix.platform }}
    steps:
    - uses: actions/checkout@master
    - uses: actions/setup-node@master
      with:
        version: 12
    - run: npm install-ci-test
    - uses:

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