You already have to inspect everything if you want to review/audit a build script. Small functions - and I specifically mean functions being written small because of misguided ideas of "clean code", as opposed to e.g. useful abstraction or reusability - become especially painful there, as you have that much more code to read, and things that go together logically (or execution-wise) are now smeared around the file.
And you can't really name such small functions well anyway, not when they're broken down for the sake of being small. Case in point, some build script I saw this week had function like `rename_foo_dll_unit_tests` calling `rename_foo_dll_in_folder` calling `rename_foo_dll` calling `rename_dlls`, a distinct call chain of four non-reused functions that should've been at most two functions.
Are all Python build scripts like that? Not really. It's just a style I've seen repeatedly. The same is the case with inscrutable Bash scripts. I think it speaks more about common practices than the language itself (notwithstanding Bash not really being meant for writing longer programs).
Conan is a package manager for C/C++, written in Python. See: https://conan.io/.
The way it works is that you can provide "recipes", which are Python scripts, that automate the process of collecting source code (usually from a remote Git repository, or a remote source tarball), patching it, making its dependencies and transitive dependencies available, building for specific platform and architecture (via any number of build systems), then packaging up and serving binaries. There's a lot of complexity involved.
Now, for the sake of this thread I want to highlight three things here:
- Conan recipes are usually made by people unaffiliated with the libraries they're packaging;
- The recipes are fully Turing-complete, do a lot of work, have their own bugs - therefore they should really be treated as software comonents themselves, for the purpose of OSS clearing/supply chain verification, except as far as I know, nobody does it;
- The recipes can, and do, patch source code and build scripts. There's supporting infrastruture for this built into Conan, and of course one can also do it by brute-force search and replace. See e.g. ZLib recipe that does it both at the same time:
Good luck keeping track of what exact code goes into your program, when using Turing-complete "recipe" programs fetched from the Internet, which fetch your libraries from somewhere else on the Internet.
