Comment by reactordev

Yeah, that's a good rule. Except, do you want to build Debug or Release? Or maybe RelWithDebugInfo? And do you want that with sanitizers maybe? And what the sanitizers' options should be? Do you want to compile your tests too, if you want to run them later on a different machine? And what about that dependency that takes two hours to compile, maybe you just want to reuse the previous compilation of it? And if so, where to take that from? Etc. etc.

Before long, you need another script that will output the train of options to your `build.sh`.

(If Fortune 500 companies can do a one-line build with zero parameters, I suspect I'd be very bored there.)

You still inevitably need a bunch of CI platform-specific bullshit for determining "is this a pull request? which branch am I running on?", etc. Depending on what you're trying to do and what tools you're working with, you may need such logic both in an accursed YAML DSL and in your build script.

And if you want your CI jobs to do things like report cute little statuses, integrate with your source forge's static analysis results viewer, or block PRs, you have to integrate with the forge at a deeper level.

There aren't good tools today for translating between the environment variables or other things that various CI platforms expose, managing secrets (if you use CI to deploy things) that are exposed in platform-specific ways, etc.

If all you're doing with CI is spitting out some binaries, sure, I guess. But if you actually ask developers what they want out of CI, it's typically more than that.

The other rule is that script should run as a user. Solely on that working directory.

There are too many scripts like that which start, ask for sudo and then it's off to implementing someones "great idea" about your systems network interfaces.

You’re not wrong but your suggestion also throws away a lot of major benefits of CI. I agree jobs should be one liners but we still need more than one…

The single job pipeline doesn’t tell you what failed. It doesn’t parallelize unit and integration test suites while dealing with the combinatorial matrix of build type, target device, etc.

At some point, a few CI runners become more powerful than a developer’s workstation. Parallelization can really matter for reducing CI times.

I’d argue the root of the problem is that we are stuck on using “make” and scripts for local build automation.

We need something descriptive enough to describe a meaningful CI pipeline but also allow local execution.

Sure, one can develop a bespoke solution, but reinventing the wheel each time gets tiring and eventually becomes a sizable time sink.

In principle, we should be able to execute pieces of .gitlab-ci.yml locally, but even that becomes non trivial with all the nonstandard YAML behaviors done in gitlab, not to mention the varied executor types.

Instead we have a CI workflow and a local workflow and hope the two are manually kept in sync.

In some sense, the current CI-only automation tools shouldn’t even need to exist (gitlab, Jenkins, etc) — why didn’t we just use a cron job running “build.sh” ?

I argue these tools should mainly only have to focus on the “reporting/artifacts” with the pipeline execution parts handled elsewhere (or also locally for a developer).

Shame on you GitLab!

How do you get caching of build steps with this approach? Or do you just not?

Sounds like the Lotus philosophy, "simplify and add lightness".

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