Comment by happymellon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by happymellon | Hacker News Reader

Aside from the docker snipe I've already commented on, everywhere that I've had to deal with Jenkins it's been an issue because it's always a pet.

There are always issues, and like the author, it's "only" about 25% of the time. A quarter of all builds fail due to things absolutely not related to that specific build.

> oh, we were resource constraint at that one second, retry and it'll probably work

> oh, we can't replicate that error message from a tool that you have no visibility over, retry and it'll probably work

> oh, we have no idea why something timed out, retry and it will probably work

Now when I have a failed build I don't actually trust the build before I don't trust that there was an edge case in an integration test that failed. Because it's almost always something outside of the code.

[Edit] downvotes but no constructive responses? The issue isn't necessarily Jenkins, it's the type of people who use Jenkins to roll their own everything.

> oh, we were resource constraint at that one second, retry and it'll probably work

Had the same issues with (self-managed) gitlab CI. This is not jenkins-specific and usually something you can fix much easier in jenkins (other than just retrying)

> oh, we can't replicate that error message from a tool that you have no visibility over, retry and it'll probably work

This could maybe be better in other, more declarative CIs but honestly, its pretty much the same. The only thing some of them have is a local runner.

> oh, we have no idea why something timed out, retry and it will probably work

Jenkins has this, yes. But use another CI with docker and you can get the same and much worse.

But in essence, yes, at our company too, jenkins is a pet. But this means that someone knows it from the inside and outside and knows which things to fix in your pipeline. Good luck with trying to extend gitlab CI (or others) to fix things you need and/or opening an issue with them.

Gitlab has quite some high-profile issues sitting around for years with customer requests piling up. In jenkins, you'll find an extension that will do exactly what you want, or you could roll your own.

You appear to be reading more into what I'm saying.

I didn't say this was exclusive to Jenkins, just that Jenkins has always been a subset of this problem. Selfhosting this, and wanting to make it completely customised to fit the whim of whatever someone in compliance/security/accounting decided is an issue. It doesn't help that Blue Ocean is a terrible UI, but that's just an ugly facade to a system that enables bad habits. Other systems can be abused, but whenever Jenkins appears it is always abused.

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