bitprophet, 21 days ago

Having read a bit more, I think what I was missing from GHA was 'composite actions’, where you can define a pile of steps to be called as a single action-step in arbitrary workflows. That's more Circle-orb-like.

A further problem tho: actions defined in private repos can only be used /if you've already checked out the repo/…which is a catch-22 if one of the things you're trying to DRY is /the act of checking out repos/ 🫠

Tho now I see why 'starter/template' workflows exist. Ah, codegen. 😩

RangerRick, 21 days ago

@bitprophet GitHub Actions definitely feels like an "oh shit, CircleCI is making a lot of money doing this, we need something fast" kind of thing. It’s possible to get things done in it, but feels pretty clunky compared to some of the fancy stuff we did with CircleCI at OpenNMS.

bitprophet, 21 days ago

Oh my GOD. #GitHub #GitHubActions inputs/outputs are /stringly typed/ even when declared as bools?! What the fuck is this horseshit?

That’s about an hour I'm never getting back.

With apologies for being so negative, let's review:

• GHA internals: spaghetti mess of bubblegum (PowerShell), shoestrings (C#), and baling wire (MSSQL)
• GHA externals: stringly typed variables, awkward/weak reusability, "cat text into a file to set env vars”, etc

So glad it's the new industry standard!

deadlydog, 21 days ago

@bitprophet yeah, I’ve been bitten by the bool as string conversion issue before too. I believe it’s a problem on both GutHub Actions and Azure DevOps Pipelines.

bitprophet, 21 days ago

@deadlydog Microsoooooooooft! 😂

hugovk, 22 days ago

@bitprophet We're using them to DRY big chunks of config.

For example, see where:

https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/main/.github/workflows/reusable-ubuntu.yml

is used in:

https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/main/.github/workflows/build.yml

webology, 22 days ago

@bitprophet I fired up Act earlier to help troubleshoot something and ~30 would not terminate instances later, that was "fun" to sort out.