Bug#971416: ITP: exec-helper -- Or How To Get Your Coffee In Peace: A meta-wrapper for executing tasks on the command line

[Bart Verhagen <barrie.verhagen@gmail.com>]

Package: wnpp
Severity: wishlist
Owner: Bart Verhagen <barrie.verhagen@gmail.com>
X-Debbugs-Cc: debian-devel@lists.debian.org, barrie.verhagen@gmail.com

* Package name    : exec-helper
  Version         : 0.6.0
  Upstream Author : Bart Verhagen <barrie.verhagen@gmail.com>
* URL             : https://github.com/exec-helper/source
* License         : BSD-3
  Programming Lang: C++
  Description     : Or How To Get Your Coffee In Peace: A meta-wrapper for executing tasks on the command line

Exec-helper improves the main bottleneck in your development workflow: you.

It does this by:

  * Reducing the number of keystrokes required to execute the same command over and over again
  * Chaining multiple commands

All without sacrificing (much) flexibility or repeating useless work.

If this, together with getting coffee in peace is not a sufficient rationale for you, the main advantages of exec-helper over (simple) scripts or plain command line commands are:

  * Easy permutation of multiple execution parameters (so-called patterns in exec-helper).
  * Easy selection of a subset of execution parameters.
  * Improved DRY: execution parameters are only changed on one spot, in stead of everywhere in your command line.
  * Technology-agnostic approach: e.g. running the exec-helper build can build a C++ project in one directory structure and a JAVA project in another.
  * Enables a self-documented workflow.
  * Out of the box support for multi-valued options and default values.
  * Searches for a suitable configuration in its parent folders.
  * Fast to type using the eh alias
  * Easy to find and/or list available commands using the --help option.
  * Easy extensible with your own, first-class citizen, plugins.
  * Automatic autocompletion of commands and patterns



I am the maintainer of this tool. It turned out to be way more useful than I ever expected it to be. Currently I use it a lot and would like to share this with the rest of the world. Adoption of the tool is slowly growing. Currently I maintain a 'packaging repository' for it (https://github.com/exec-helper/package) in which Debian is supported since 2017. In the meantime this effort evolved into pre-compiled packages that ought to be downloaded and installed manually. Now that more and more people are using it, I would like to more explicitly share this tool with the community and provide a more convenient way to install this tool for Debian users.

My proposal is to maintain the package myself on a best-effort basis. There is no need for any co-maintainers or sponsors, although all advice on improving the (current) packaging approach is much appreciated.