Smart build system detection

[richard-hajek]

A fun quality of life addition would be for task to function as an alias to existing build systems. For example, when encountering package.json task would delegate all calls to npm, unless an existing Taskfile would be present.

Possible use cases:

• Translating calls from task to npm
• Translating calls from task to cargo
• Translating calls from task to go
  ....

This would be by no means a full replacement of the original tool. The task build would do little more than an alias to go build/cargo build/npm build. Implementation wise it could be basically a list of known build systems and a Taskfile for each of them.

[pd93]

This might cause issues when a project contains both a go.mod and package.json. For example, if I run task test do we call go test or npm test? How do we decide which one gets priority? I think most users would just end up creating wrapper tasks in a Taskfile if they wanted this functionality to be exposed via the task command. This ensures they're always going to be running the correct command and gives them much better control.

Using a wrapper also lets you add more advanced functionality. For example, instead of task install just exposing npm install, we can create a custom wrapper and add fingerprinting so that it only gets run if the package.json has been updated or if node_modules is missing.

[richard-hajek]

This might cause issues when a project contains both a go.mod and package.json. For example, if I run task test do we call go test or npm test? How do we decide which one gets priority?

Give up with a text message "No Taskfile found and ambigous project type, we are unable to find reasonable command"

I think most users would just end up creating wrapper tasks in a Taskfile if they wanted this functionality to be exposed via the task command.

True. However the usecase I had in mind would be

1. You download a random NPM project
2. You don't feel like checking NPM docs for the specific build command (is it npm build, node build, npm run build? )
3. You run task build, which will print the actual command it uses, so you know what to use next time instead, and it also does the commnd

Using a wrapper also lets you add more advanced functionality.

All of this could also be included in the default built-in wrapper functionality. But that would require expert knowledge in all those other build systems which might be overkill and too much work

[andreynering]

Hi @richard-hajek,

I think your idea is valid but it does not fit this project IMO. Task should be focused on running Taskfiles.

I think your idea could implemented on a brand new project, dedicated to this.