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Folks pick the wrong tool for the job at hand. I suspect the author of the article could greatly simplify matters if they used a task running tool to orchestra

Folks pick the wrong tool for the job at hand. I suspect the author of the article could greatly simplify matters if they used a task running tool to orchestrate running tasks, for example. Pick whatever manner of decoupling you want really, most of the time this is the path to simplified CI actions. CI is best when its thought of as a way to stand up fresh copies of an environment to run things inside of. I have never had the struggles that so many have had with CI as a result. Frankly, I'm consistently surprised at how overly complex people make their CI configurations. There's better tools for orchestration and dependency dependent builds, which is not its purpose to begin with.

ledauphin 2y ago
I generally agree with you, but I'd be interested to hear your take on what the purpose of CI _actually is_. It seems to me that a big part of the problem here (which I have also seen/experienced) is that there's no one specific thing that something like GitHub Actions is uniquely suited for. Instead, people want "a bunch of stuff to happen" when somebody pushes a commit, and they imagine that the best way to trigger all of that is to have an incredibly complex - and also bespoke - system on the other end that does all of it. It's like we learned the importance of modularity in the the realm of software design, but never applied what we learned to the tools that we work with.
- no_wizard 2y ago
  Standing up fresh images for validation and post validation tasks. CI shines for running tests against a clean environment for example. Really any task that benefits from a clean image being stood before running a task. The key though is to decouple the tasks from the CI. Complexity like pre-packaging artifacts is not a great fit for CI configuration, that is best pushed to a tool that doesn’t require waterfall logic to make it work. There is a reason task runners are very popular still

ledauphin 2y ago

I generally agree with you, but I'd be interested to hear your take on what the purpose of CI _actually is_. It seems to me that a big part of the problem here (which I have also seen/experienced) is that there's no one specific thing that something like GitHub Actions is uniquely suited for. Instead, people want "a bunch of stuff to happen" when somebody pushes a commit, and they imagine that the best way to trigger all of that is to have an incredibly complex - and also bespoke - system on the other end that does all of it. It's like we learned the importance of modularity in the the realm of software design, but never applied what we learned to the tools that we work with.

no_wizard 2y ago
Standing up fresh images for validation and post validation tasks. CI shines for running tests against a clean environment for example. Really any task that benefits from a clean image being stood before running a task. The key though is to decouple the tasks from the CI. Complexity like pre-packaging artifacts is not a great fit for CI configuration, that is best pushed to a tool that doesn’t require waterfall logic to make it work. There is a reason task runners are very popular still