Re: intergrating external tools vs makefiles

> But should it be possible to use xproc pipelines instead of a makefile?

You can, but there are tradeoffs. Tools like Make (and Gradle, etc.) are designed to do some level of dependency management for you. If A depends on B and B depends on C, then a change to C requires rebuilding A and B. But if B hasn’t changed, you don’t need to rebuild A.

Out of the box, XProc doesn’t have that kind of functionality. (I wrote it for my 1.0 processor years ago and will likely re-implement it in my 3.0 processor in the fullness of time, but it’s not standard functionality.)

On the other hand, if you’re using Make, you’re potentially starting a new JVM process for every step. That can be expensive. (Years ago, I got heaps of praise from a user who cut a big job down from 11 hours to tens of minutes by switching to XProc. The big win wasn’t really XProc, exactly, it was not starting a new JVM instance hundreds of thousands of times.)

If the pipeline is easier to maintain and you don’t find its performance problematic, you win! :-)

                                        Be seeing you,
                                          norm

--
Norm Tovey-Walsh <ndw@nwalsh.com>
https://norm.tovey-walsh.com/

> Any sufficiently abstract art form is indistinguisable from
> rubbish.--Sean McGrath