Comment by Storment33
11 hours ago
I would disagree with 1. if you need anything more than shell that starts to become a smell to me. The build/testing process etc should be simple enough to not need anything more.
11 hours ago
I would disagree with 1. if you need anything more than shell that starts to become a smell to me. The build/testing process etc should be simple enough to not need anything more.
That's literally point #2, but I had the same reaction as you when I first read point #1 :)
I agree with #2, I meant more if you are calling out to something that is not a task runner(Make, Taskfile, Just etc) or a shell script thats a bit of a smell to me. E.g. I have seen people call out to Python scripts etc and it concerns me.
My software runs on Windows, Linux and MacOS. The same Python testing code runs on all three platforms. I mostly dislike Python but I can't think of anything better for this use case.
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It's interesting because #1 is still suggesting a shell script, it's just suggesting a better shell to script.
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Huh? Who cares if the script is .sh, .bash, Makefile, Justfile, .py, .js or even .php? If it works it works, as long as you can run it locally, it'll be good enough, and sometimes it's an even better idea to keep it in the same language the rest of the project is. It all depends and what language a script is made in shouldn't be considered a "smell".
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I mean, at some point you are bash calling some other language anyway.
I'm a huge fan of "train as you fight", whatever build tools you have locally should be what's used in CI.
If your CI can do things that you can't do locally: that is a problem.
> If your CI can do things that you can't do locally: that is a problem.
IME this is where all the issues lie. Our CI pipeline can push to a remote container registry, but we can't do this locally. CI uses wildly different caching strategies to local builds, which diverges. Breaking up builds into different steps means that you need to "stash" the output of stages somewhere. If all your CI does is `make test && make deploy` then sure, but when you grow beyond that (my current project takes 45 minutes with a _warm_ cache) you need to diverge, and that's where the problems start.
Ironically, at least for a couple recent projects... just installing dependencies fresh is as fast on GH Actions as the GH caching methods, so I removed the caching and simplified the workflows.
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> If your CI can do things that you can't do locally: that is a problem.
Probably most of the times when this is an actual problem, is building across many platforms. I'm running Linux x86_64 locally, but some of my deliverables are for macOS and Windows and ARM, and while I could cross-compile for all of them on Linux (macOS was a bitch to get working though), it always felt better to compile on the hardware I'm targeting.
Sometimes there are Windows/macOS-specific failures, and if I couldn't just ssh in and correct/investigate, and instead had to "change > commit > push" in an endless loop, it's possible I'd quite literally would lose my mind.
I literally had to do this push > commit > test loop yesterday because apparently building universal Python wheels on MacOS is a pain in the ass. And I don't have a mac, so if I want to somewhat reliably reproduce how the runner might behave, I have to either test it on GH actions or rent one from something like Scaleway. Mainly because I don't currently knwo how else to do it. It's so, so frustrating and if anyone has ideas on making my life a bit better that would be nice lol.
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> If your CI can do things that you can't do locally: that is a problem.
Completely agree.
> I'm a huge fan of "train as you fight", whatever build tools you have locally should be what's used in CI.
That is what I am doing, having my GitHub Actions just call the Make targets I am using locally.
> I mean, at some point you are bash calling some other language anyway.
Yes, shell scripts and or task runners(Make, Just, Task etc) are really just plumbing around calling other tools. Which is why it feels like a smell to me when you need something more.