Cross platform scripting

[Markus Weimer <ma...@weimo.de>]

Hi,

we have plenty of opportunities for automation in our builds and
development. For example:

  * Automate the simple parts of a PR review (run checkstyle, the test,
    RAT, ...)
  * Automate parts of the release process (version updates, checksums,
    uploads, ...)

Those are typically handled by build system. Given our dual stack (.NET
and JVM), this is trickier for us than usual. We will have a need for
custom solutions for the foreseeable future.

Hence my question: Should we pick a single cross-platform scripting
language for those things? That way, we only have to add one dependency
to our build environments and can possibly share the scripts between
Windows and UNIX developers.

What do you think? And if you are in favor, which language should we
pick. Mine would be Python.

Markus