So I'm looking for a command line solution to handling generic tooling tasks such as "bump version number", or "modify deps.edn to add something to :deps" ... do we just write our own scripts to do that sort of thing or is there a canonical solution?

https://github.com/clojure/tools.deps.alpha/wiki/Tools#versioning-and-releasing should help you 🙂

(and lots of other useful tools there too)

Also I'm still really curious what the heck a build.clj file is, such this:

(require '[cljs.build.api :as b])

(b/build "src"
  {:output-dir "out"
   :output-to "out/main.js"
   :optimizations :none
   :main 'example.core
   :install-deps true
   :npm-deps {:react "15.6.1"
              :react-dom "15.6.1"}})

It's nothing special. It's just a clojure program that can be run.

Maybe an intermediate step on the way to tools-deps?

No. tools-deps doesn't care abut build tools at all.

To run their example, back in 2017 you did this: java -cp ls ../../lib/*.jar | paste -sd ":" -`:../../src/main/cljs:../../src/main/clojure:src clojure.main build.clj` with tools-deps you can do this though: clojure build.clj

2017 was rough 😬

probably why so many used lein

Is there a place in deps.edn where we put license/version info or does that go somewhere else now?

somewhere else. pom.xml like before would be fine I think.

:thumbsup:

@alexmiller in tools.deps.alpha.reader, is it worth having the user-deps locator as a separate function? In pack the issue has been raised to include part of the user deps.edn which seems acceptable. That part is just for including maven repo settings which are user-local.

Sure

will open a jira