sane, the sane command
runner.Hello. This past week I published version 7 of
sane, my bespoke command runner written in vanilla
(standard library) Python, and contained in a single file.
Quoting from sane’s manual page:
Why use sane?
Sane is 1. extremely portable, and 2. low (mental) overhead. This is because (1.) sane is fully contained in a single Python file, so you can (and should!) distribute it alongside your codebase, and (2.) sane is vanilla Python. The second property makes sane extremely expressive – in fact, sane can do anything Python can – and prevents the introduction of more domain-specific languages.
Of course, with great power comes great responsibility, and sane is trivially Turing complete; that is, after all, the point. Therefore, there are more (and more unpredictable) ways to fail critically. But, as Python has shown over the years, this flexibility is not much of a problem in practice, especially when compared to the advantages it brings, and given that other, more structured, tools are still available to be used in tandem.
sane is pretty magic; calling import
sane is enough to get started. This does come with its
caveats, but this magic can optionally be disabled.
sane is also prepared to make use of concurrency
(within the limits of Python): its topological sort algorithm
identifies tasks that can be run in parallel, which can be
activated with a Make-like --jobs flag.
Another focus point of sane is ergonomics: just
about everything the user (as in, you) passes to
sane is validated, and reflection is used to try to
identify exactly the source of error and provide the user with
specific and helpful feedback (and even an explicit solution,
where possible). Here, Rust was very much an influence.
Version 7 of sane is a full rewrite, down to the
documentation.
I don’t expect sane to replace Make or other
bigger scale or specialised build solutions, but I do think it
can be a good option for small-scale projects or prototypes, and
everything that can benefit from portability.
By the way, sane deploys this website! It builds
Markdown files into HTML files.