I’d argue the counterpoint actually: Writing Makefile targets for common commands significantly improves usability and ergonomics, especially when they follow common idioms (make test, make build, make install, ...).
The recipes for each target describe not only how a project intends to run each tool, but which tools it intends to run. Instead of having to know that this project runs tests under tox, while that one runs only under pytest, we can run ‘make test’ in each, and count on the recipe doing the Right Thing.
That consistency across projects makes it much easier for someone to get started on a new project (or to remember how the pieces fit together on your own project from a few months ago)
For me it’s important for a testing command to be able to receive parameters at runtime (for example tox test —- —pdb) , is it possible to do that with make in general? I never knew how.
I generally agree with your sentiment, though. I’m usually limiting myself to Python stuff so don’t have much exposure to make, it’s always felt like a less powerful task runner than other stuff
The recipes for each target describe not only how a project intends to run each tool, but which tools it intends to run. Instead of having to know that this project runs tests under tox, while that one runs only under pytest, we can run ‘make test’ in each, and count on the recipe doing the Right Thing.
That consistency across projects makes it much easier for someone to get started on a new project (or to remember how the pieces fit together on your own project from a few months ago)