Replace Makefile with Dagger

[karanngi]

Reason/Context

Makefiles are brittle, platform-dependent, and hard to maintain, while Dagger provides consistent, containerized builds with declarative pipelines that work everywhere. It eliminates "works on my machine" issues and scales cleanly compared to Make's shell script sprawl.

Description

Benefits of Dagger:

1. Consistent builds – Runs in containers, eliminating "works on my machine" issues.
2. Portable workflows – No more shell script hacks for cross-platform compatibility.
3. Declarative pipelines – Define workflows in code (Go/Python) instead of brittle Make rules.
4. Reusable components – Share and version-control pipelines across projects.
5. Faster CI/CD integration – Native support for GitHub Actions, GitLab, etc.

Next Steps:

Prototype a core workflow (e.g., build/test) in Dagger.

Benchmark vs. Makefile for readability and performance.

Feedback? Should we trial this for a subset of tasks?

Implementation ideas

No response

[meethereum]

Harbor CLI also uses the same thing. They used to use Makefiles as well. Maybe I can work on this?

[github-actions[bot]]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity :sleeping:

It will be closed in 30 days if no further activity occurs. To unstale this issue, add a comment with a detailed explanation.

There can be many reasons why some specific issue has no activity. The most probable cause is lack of time, not lack of interest. Microcks is a Cloud Native Computing Foundation project not owned by a single for-profit company. It is a community-driven initiative ruled under open governance model.

Let us figure out together how to push this issue forward. Connect with us through one of many communication channels we established here.

Thank you for your patience :heart: