Doing it wrong
"In a non-ironic way, we say 50 per cent of a developer's time is spent in config files,"
It is? Wow, I and everyone I've ever worked with must be doing it wrong, because I would have put that percentage at less than 1.
At its annual developer conference on Tuesday, GitHub unveiled a way to automate software deployment workflows called Actions. It sounds rather underwhelming, given all the different automation tools available, but the executives discussing it brimmed with Apple-level enthusiasm. Sam Lambert, head of platform for GitHub, called …
I smell that (see topic).
What I see: Yet another overly-complex market-speak technology being touted as the 'new shiny' that everyone MUST embrace, which really targets a tiny percentage of customers/end-users, and probably complicates more things than it de-complicates in the process, and will likely be abandoned later down the road for YET ANOTHER new, shiny. But other git services won't have "this", so it attempts to keep people from migrating elsewhere...
Yep. Smells like Micro-shaft's influence allright. I'm predictably underwhelmed.
Just how much 'automation' do we need from git repos anyway? I've seen one attempt at integrating the git repo stuff into 'things' before, and it resulted in a virtually unusable [because it was SO pig-slow] google doc spreadsheet that was trying to track hours to issues in a private github repo. I've seen better performance on a swap-bound windows '95 system with 4Mb. Example: waiting 30 seconds to a MINUTE for a change I typed in to 'take' so I could move the cursor (due to the formulas copy/pasta'd throughout the spreadsheet). Yeah, it was THAT bad. Do we need MORE things like that? I suspect NOT.
(I tracked hours manually and it was a lot easier, and probably a lot faster, by storing a draft e-mail on an IMAP server that had the hours and issues in it, as simple plain text)
You know, you could just go with Chef. Or Terraform. Or probably Puppet. (I've not seen the last one.)
The syntax is HORRIBLE. And these are NOT config files. They don't even dare to call them that. These are DSLs for arbitrary code execution wrapped & hidden so as to make it hard (or impossible) to test. Chef's saving grace is that the testing ethic is so strong the in the ruby community that Chef kitchen was out within months.
JUST DON'T.
If your computational needs are Turing complete, you need a Turning complete facility to manage them. Sticking some arcane DSL wrapper over the problem is ALWAYS going to fail as system grows.