I mean that example is frustrating because obviously `make deploy` and `python deploy.py` are both pretty simple so they are easy to remember.
One common pattern that I'll see though is deploy.py not being top level so `python deploy.py` becomes `python scripts/deployments/staging/deploy.py` so you still get the benefit of not wondering where `deploy.py` is.
Another is the configuration file also having a default version that is not obvious. Something like `configuration/deployments/staging.yaml`.
Now you might argue that I'm exaggerating (and I think it's fair to say that some refactoring could be valuable), but the simple `python deploy.py` now actually is.
`python scripts/deployments/staging/deploy.py -c configuration/deployments/staging.yaml` which is significantly harder to remember than `make deploy-staging` for example.
I am a big advocate for and user of this pattern with Make.
However there is one non-trivial downside with (GNU) Make, and that is the non-visibility of env vars set with `export` when running `make -n`. That is, if your Makefile looks like this:
Then `make -n do-it` will not show the exported FOOBAR variable. This makes it somewhat more difficult to audit or inspect with `make -n`.
The output from `make -np` is incredibly verbose and isn't easy to filter with standard CLI tools, which makes this doubly frustrating. You basically need to write an AWK/Perl/Python program to parse it. If there was one feature I'd pay good money to add to a new version of GNU Make, it's an option to emit more-easily machine-readable output from `make -p`, or to ship a script in the GNU Make package that parses it into something standard like JSON or XML.
One common pattern that I'll see though is deploy.py not being top level so `python deploy.py` becomes `python scripts/deployments/staging/deploy.py` so you still get the benefit of not wondering where `deploy.py` is.
Another is the configuration file also having a default version that is not obvious. Something like `configuration/deployments/staging.yaml`.
Now you might argue that I'm exaggerating (and I think it's fair to say that some refactoring could be valuable), but the simple `python deploy.py` now actually is.
`python scripts/deployments/staging/deploy.py -c configuration/deployments/staging.yaml` which is significantly harder to remember than `make deploy-staging` for example.