i'm going through all my bought/downloaded music to fill the storage on my old busted phone, since my sansa e250r can't take it all and also since the old phone can run my biking app and use location services without a sim

i decided to look in my itunes library and past me of ten years ago has left behind a very interesting time capsule of who they were by what kinds of music they bought off itunes.

this is my friend birdie cat

You shall be unsilenced, but IM WATCHIN YOU BUDDY

Don't need any more of that I'm already dealing with enough of it today as is

Context: multiple git repositories in different languages building various front-end and back-end projects. Some repos build a single app, others build multiple distinct targets. Some builds/apps can be configured by editing config files. Build processes are one or more commands.

What I want: a unified way to build and run these projects, so that someone familiar with our conventions can, without reading documentation specific to the repo:

• figure out which apps exist in a given repo
• build any of them (with a single command)
• run any of them (with a single command)
• easily configure them for common scenarios (e.g. “use the backend service that is running on a shared server” vs. “use the backend service I have running locally on a known port”)

In my mind this seems like maybe what Bazel can do. But is it? The docs are slightly inscrutable at a casual glance (everything is defined in terms of everything else) and People I Trust have said “hmm maybe don’t” when I mentioned I was looking at Bazel.

Any opinions out there?

Edit: I should add that I want this to be nonintrusive. I want to add support for “a better way” without breaking any existing tools or processes, so that this can be a gradual migration to “see I told you this was easier”.