Comment by bamboozled | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bamboozled | Hacker News Reader

Just a warning for those who haven't ventured into actions yet, I would have to say so far I've found the experience very, very average. Even just doing something simple like posting a release notification to Slack seems to end up with me having the action triggered a random number of times causing multiple messages being posted to slack. The whole experience feels amateur and clunky.

There are issues open to look into it but no fix in sight yet. While this announcement sounds useful, don't throw away your current CI/CD tooling which is probably a lot nicer to use.

Lastly I really dislike how pretty much any really useful actions are created and maintained by single people. There are just some actions I'd want to see be supported by GitHub, I don't wan to have to handover things like Slack access keys to a non-trusted third party to post messages.

Every time I try to use actions I'm surprised it was launched in it's current obscure, unpolished state.

This feature release has been a dumpster fire from my perspective. I love GitHub and what they are trying to do, but I read over the Actions documentation 2x and I still can't tell if my use case is supported: I just want to see if master builds on a net core app without spinning up or otherwise utilizing some other cloud instance.

Also, I am not even sure what the appropriate syntax to use is with all the mixed messaging and examples (YAML or the other thing? Which do I use!?).

Regardless of which variant of syntax I attempted, the actions UI told me there was some generic error and that nothing was to be done. One additional problem I noticed is that if you have a protected master branch, you are going to be forced to get code reviews from your team every single time you try to iterate on the workflow script. There is no apparent way to test or validate actions without committing directly to master and seeing what the result may be.

All around, a complete mess in my estimation. I will be sticking with Jenkins for the foreseeable future. This GH feature is apparently not designed for people who care about straightforward solutions to simple problems:

  git clone <repo>
  dotnet build
  <if failure, flag build, create issue, send email, etc>

That is all I want to do, Microsoft. Can you handle that? I feel like there should just be a simple toggle switch in my GH repo for this concern, considering Microsoft is now responsible for that entire vertical stack.

Good point. This could very easily lead to the same problems plaguing the NPM ecosystem — an action repo could be sold to a malicious actor, giving them full access to your entire codebase!

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