In software development, perfect the goal. We all want to get there. Yesterday. Thing is, perfect takes time to achieve. It’s going to take many releases before you crest that mountain.
Meanwhile, you expect people to use your software and get value out of it. When designing the software, you’ve got to pick from one of two choices.
With Buildr we chose from the very beginning to make it serviceable:
Apache Buildr isn’t perfect. … If something doesn’t work they way you think it ought to, you can easily dig into Buildr’s very readable Ruby code, something I couldn’t do with either Maven or Ant, and either customise it or find a quick workaround. You don’t have this black-box barrier between your buildscript and its output.