Speaking as someone who frequently injects the most ridiculous of things into a makefile in order to bootstrap build tools and such things... and as someone who had learned my way through enough of the Chrome OS build tool chain to customise a fork of it for building my own variant of CoreOS back in the early days before Kubernetes won the container platform wars...
It depends. Sometimes you use these tools because they are already responsible for so much stuff it makes sense to just extend it no matter how crazy it is (Chrome Os build tool was built as hundreds of lines of shell script which built on top of portage which is even more hundred of lines of shell script) ... sometimes it’s because that’s the tool you know will be available (the dozens of bootstrap scripts I’ve beaten crushed and smashed into makefiles complete with OS detection and other stuff) ... and sometimes you don’t have any read you just do it because it’s what your comfortable thinking in. I’ve definitely written bash scripts that would have been better in Python but at the time my mind was building the script up as a sequence of Unix tool operations and pipelines not as a Python program.
It depends. Sometimes you use these tools because they are already responsible for so much stuff it makes sense to just extend it no matter how crazy it is (Chrome Os build tool was built as hundreds of lines of shell script which built on top of portage which is even more hundred of lines of shell script) ... sometimes it’s because that’s the tool you know will be available (the dozens of bootstrap scripts I’ve beaten crushed and smashed into makefiles complete with OS detection and other stuff) ... and sometimes you don’t have any read you just do it because it’s what your comfortable thinking in. I’ve definitely written bash scripts that would have been better in Python but at the time my mind was building the script up as a sequence of Unix tool operations and pipelines not as a Python program.