Comment by ljm

1 month ago

Still using CircleCI. I do not love YAML at all, in fact I hate it because it's basically a 1980s text preprocessor on steroids and with dependency management. Too much logic applied to config that depends on implicit syntax and unintuitive significant whitespace.

I mean, I had an issue once where this broke the pipeline:

   key:
     - value 1
     - value 2

But this was fine:

    key:
    - value 1
    - value 2

Fuck that noise!

Otherwise it works just as good as it ever did and I don't miss Github Actions where every pipeline step is packaged into a dependency. I think Github has stagnated harder than CircleCI.

2 comments

ljm

woodruffw 1 month ago

> I mean, I had an issue once where this broke the pipeline:

It seems fair to dislike YAML (I dislike it too), but I don't understand how this broke for you unless CircleCI (or whoever) isn't actually using a legal YAML parser.

    irb(main):009:0> YAML.load <<EOD
    irb(main):010:0" key:
    irb(main):011:0"  - value 1
    irb(main):012:0"  - value 2
    irb(main):013:0" EOD
    => {"key"=>["value 1", "value 2"]}
    irb(main):014:0> YAML.load <<EOD
    irb(main):015:0" key:
    irb(main):016:0" - value 1
    irb(main):017:0" - value 2
    irb(main):018:0" EOD
    => {"key"=>["value 1", "value 2"]}

(This works for any number of leading spaces, so long as the spacing is consistent.)

jborean93 1 month ago

There shouldn't be any difference between those two values. I'm not saying you are wrong and it didn't break but it's definitely surprising a parser would choke on that vs YAML itself being the problem.

Don't get me wrong I can empathise with whitespace formatting being annoying and having both forms be valid just adds confusion it's just surprising to see this was the problem.