It's not my club, I'm just sharing the link.

Though from what I saw there is an information that the site uses affiliate links?

I agree, notice that I use `make` together with `npm` as an example. Or with `setup.py`. Language build tools are great, but `make` comes in when you need to tie them together.

Yes, but this requires Ruby which may pose some problems. I am well aware of rake and like it very much. But I wouldn't consider it a proper replacement for make.

Will look at it, thanks!

That's exactly how I did my thesis ^^

Same for me, but because I had a lot of TikZ images and pgfplots, I made it so that I could compile each chapter individually to reduce the compile time during editing. Basically, each chapter file would look like:

  \ifx\ispreambleloaded%
    \relax%
  \else%
    \def\isstandalone{}%
    \input{preamble}%
  \fi

  % ... content ...

  \ifx\isstandalone\end{document}\fi%

and the preamble.tex would look like:

  \documentclass{scrbook}
  % ... all the other stuff that goes in the preamble ...
  \begin{document}
  \def\ispreambleloaded{}%

(Note: Recounting this all from memory, so I may have gotten some stuff wrong.)

You are right! I notified the editors to learn why the code got lost during editing.

Hi, I am the author of this article and I have to say I partly agree with you. For huge scale deployments Ansible is not very good and the alternatives mentioned at the end of the article (Salt and StackStorm) seem to be better suited for such deployment. When the scale is smaller, though, the push model is in my opinion nice as it does not require setting up a server. You can start right away. Also, reusing SSH means (almost) no dependencies as mentioned in the article. It may all depend on the use case though, but in my opinion running Ansible is much better than manual configuration or using shell scripts.