It's a workaround for a babashka bug which I haven't gotten around to bringing up in #CLX41ASCS yet. Sometimes for reasons unbeknownst to me, babashka gets an incorrect classpath. You try to run a babashka task, and it just says "function not found" or something like that (I don't remember the error message). bb --force -e nil -- specifically the --force part -- forces babashka to recompute the classpath. I've stuck it in there as a pre-emptive measure, so hopefully biff users won't run into the error (unless they make modifications to bb.edn and/or the tasks.clj file--I'm not sure exactly what triggers the error).

I'm curious if something like that is the error you're running into?

I see. Yeah, I have a different problem, and one I couldn't just work around the way I was thinking, because all the tasks were moved to bb - which seems totally sensible. I ended up comparing (`meld` ftw) the output of creating the example project up to that point with my fleshed-out one, and manually fixing up my project to work with the latest. Wasn't too bad 🙂 fwiw, the thing I encounter is:

momerath@gene ~/git/tmp/articulatus $ bb -e '(+ 1 1)'
* run-java-tool was invoked directly
* run-java-tool should only be used via symlinks to it

google has nothing for me, so I'm betting it's gentoo related (how many people use babashka on gentoo?)

interesting--yep, haven't seen that one myself 🙂 . That is a difficult thing to search for... got a few leads with this though; it does seem to be a gentoo thing: https://www.google.com/search?q=%22run-java-tool%22+gentoo

wow- that's better than what I was getting; I guess I got too specific or something. thanks!