[Feature request] do you plan to support prerequisites-like?

[CircleCode]

I like run approach to scripts management. I find it clever, and I think it can be much more understandable in a lot of situations. However, what I would miss is something similar to prerequisities. Since run does not "produce files", but instead "runs scripts", I would assume this would be a list of commands to be run before the choosen one.

For example:

hello-world: get-name
    echo "Hello, ${NAME}"

get-name:
    read _NAME
    export NAME=${_NAME}

Of course, this example makes no sense, but shows the idea.

[TekWizely]

Greetings @CircleCode !

do you plan to support prerequisites

Indeed I do! There are a lot of nuances to consider. Just off the top of my head:

• Passing arguments to the other commands
• Passing variables to the other commands
• Orchestrating multiple commands
• Deciding when/if to pass STDIN and when/if to capture STDOUT (i.e. Piping)
• Invoking general shell commands as well as run commands

Figuring out what features are desirable / feasible and what the syntax might look like is going to take some thinking.

But yes I do plan to support the idea and now we have a place for discussion on it so thanks for opening the issue !

-TW

NOTE: Regarding your example: A sub-shell's environment variables are not available to the parent, so trying to support a use case where a command script can set variables that can be available to other commands is going to be tricky. We will likely need a convention where the script generates "nam=value" pairs as STDOUT and Run captures the output and parses the variables.

[TekWizely]

@CircleCode I just wanted to let you know that I recently added a feature that brings some support for calling other commands from within your command script. See here:

• Invoking Other Commands & Runfiles

Using your example, this would look like:

Runfile

EXPORT RUN := ${.RUN}
EXPORT RF  := ${.RUNFILE}

hello-world:
    eval $( ${RUN} -r ${RF} get-name )
    echo "Hello, ${NAME}"

get-name:
    read _NAME
    echo export NAME=${_NAME}

usage

$ echo Newman | run hello-world

Hello, Newman

I'm actually using a similar technique in a project so that multiple scripts can haves access to a bunch of config variables.

Hope that helps!

-TW

[TekWizely]

@CircleCode You may be interested in my recent PR ( #63 ) which introduces the ability to easily invoke other commands before or after your command executes.

I'm still grinding on ways to consume variables from other commands.

[TekWizely]

Going to close this as some form of command dependency has been introduced - thank you for your interested in my project !