I think that this article and the discussion around it are more of a condemnation of the way GitHub Actions and similar software works rather than a generic “releasing software is hard”. One of the first things this guy mentioned in the article is that he went down this route because GHA sucks and he can’t run it locally (I know about act, but it ain’t a solution for everything)
I realize you’ve probably thought about this a lot since I know you as the guy who wrote “mazzle” and posted about it here a few months ago. I wish more CI systems worked closer to the thing you designed.
I would like things to run locally by default and then deployed to the cloud where they run.
Should be easier to debug problems if I can get the code to my machine and investigate issues with tools that my computer has such as "strace", "perf" and debug logging that I liberally apply to the build script.
In production we would have log aggregation and log search (such as ELK stack) and it is a good habit to get into the perspective of debugging production via tooling.
But CICD feels before that tooling in the pipeline. You could wire up your CICD to log to ELK but I would prefer local deployable software.
I think my focus on automating things means I want to be capable of seeing how the thing works without relying on a deployed black box in the cloud and using assumptions of how it works rather than direct investigation.
One of my journal entries is almost a lamentation of all the things that need to be done to release and use software.
