Comment by KronisLV

> Part of the problem, maybe the whole problem, is that we could get it all working and portable and optimized for non-blessed environments, but it still will only be expected to work over there, and so the frog keeps boiling.

Build the software inside of containers (or VMs, I guess): a fresh environment for every build, any caches or previous build artefacts explicitly mounted.

Then, have something like this, so those builds can also be done locally: https://docs.drone.io/quickstart/cli/

Then you can stack as many turtles as you need - such as having build scripts that get executed as a part of your container build, having Maven or whatever else you need inside of there.

It can be surprisingly sane: your CI server doing the equivalent of "docker build -t my_image ..." and then doing something with it, whereas during build time there's just a build.sh script inside.