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Comment by mathstuf | Hacker News Reader

Is it just me or does this seem to only support Linux and leave all other platforms out to dry?

I'd guess Linux is the most important platform for most customers. Also, it's probably the easiest and least expensive platform to support. I'd be very surprised if they'd picked another platform to support in their initial release of this feature.

The "every job uses a Docker container" is what worries me. Because the other two certainly don't have a robust container mechanism. Sure, Windows has something, but it is a far cry from "pick a distro, install some stuff, and call it a day" because there's some blessed image that supports installing .NET stuff and if you don't base on that, you're SoL (at least last I checked). And that's even ignoring the lack of rendering if you need it or the filesystem performance hit they seemed to be plagued with.

There's the exec runner which can be used without any separation, so it's not very secure but doesn't require docker...

In the event of things going nasty with export regulations, it appears we are left with FOSS UNIX clones, and ISO/ECMA based programming languages, or those independent from corporate stewardship.

The underlying tech (Woodpecker) supports running tasks on Linux, MacOS, and Windows. It seems like they are still just in the testing phase, maybe they need a customer to run builds on all 3.

I don't see any docs about that. How is the `image` value used on macOS and expected to contain some usable macOS filesystem layout? Are you expected to SSH to a machine running the target platform from a Docker container and run the commands that way?

Yeah the docs are lacking. The way Woodpecker works is, there is a Server, that is sort of the "manager"; you only run one of these. You run one Agent on each host that you want builds to happen on. The Agent then executes the steps of your Pipeline on a "platform", which is an Agent running on a particular OS.

By default an Agent just wants to execute jobs in a Docker container, using the docker backend. But there are multiple backends. To run a build on Windows/MacOS, you would download the Go binary for the Agent for that platform, and execute it with the right environment variables to specify the local backend.

I think a lot of this functionality is just now getting added to Woodpecker so it's not been documented. It's been in Drone for a long time, but the fork is from a while ago.

https://woodpecker-ci.org/docs/administration/setup https://woodpecker-ci.org/docs/administration/agent-config https://woodpecker-ci.org/docs/usage/pipeline-syntax#platfor... https://github.com/woodpecker-ci/woodpecker/tree/master/pipe...

Ok, so it sounds a lot like the GitLab-CI architecture then. Thanks.

here in the USA, Apple and Microsoft repeatedly lock out Linux|*nix from interoperability, marketing, transparency and more .. Linux Foundation appears to be a marketing club for Fortune 500.. where is this perspective ? You developers must include proprietary duopoly in any "open" effort but wait at the back door until I return and tell you what I want to ?

Projects I work on are cross-platform. When evaluating or comparing CI solutions, is that not a requirement to consider?

And I'm not saying that not supporting yet is a problem, but the docs saying "everything happens in Docker" implies a lack of forward-thinking in the design of the system that wholly excludes working elsewhere (including FreeBSD or other FOSS platforms).

Apparently it is being supported, but the docs will need some clarification now that some of the advertised assumptions are no longer going to be true.

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