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miohtama a day ago

Everyone is free to use alternative CI/CD workflow pipelines. These are often better than Github Actions.

These include

- https://circleci.com/

- https://www.travis-ci.com/

- Gitlab

Open source:

- https://concourse-ci.org/ (discussed in the context of Radicle here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44658820 )

- Jenkins

-etc.

Anyone can complain as much as they want, but unless they put the money where their mouth is, it's just noise from lazy people.

saagarjha a day ago | parent | next [-]

I’d appreciate not being called lazy for mentioning a lack of investment on Microsoft’s side to secure their paid and fairly lucrative service that they bought a popular code hosting platform to integrate with.

rjzzleep a day ago | parent | next [-]

Can someone explain what this somewhat recent phenomenon is where people feel the need to defend the worlds biggest billion dollar businesses, that are also often subsidized by tax payer money in weird ways?

How did we go in 20 years from holding these companies to account when they'd misbehave to acting as if they are poor damsels in distress whenever someone points out a flaw?

drdec a day ago | parent | next [-]

> How did we go in 20 years from holding these companies to account when they'd misbehave to acting as if they are poor damsels in distress whenever someone points out a flaw?

Honestly I think the problem is more a rosy view of the past versus any actual change in behavior. There have always been defenders of such companies.

hexbin010 a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> How did we go in 20 years from holding these companies to account when they'd misbehave to acting as if they are poor damsels in distress whenever someone points out a flaw?

They hired a ton of people on very very good salaries

tonyhart7 a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I think big tech being so big now that these "issue" is too small for their priority is saying something

You better thank god for MS for being lazy and incompetent, the last thing we want for big tech is being innovative and have a stronger monopoly

nsoqm a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The original comment said to stop giving money to these companies if they are not giving you a satisfactory service.

The opposite, to be lazy and to continue giving them money whilst being unhappy with what you get in return, would actually be more like defending the companies.

ImPostingOnHN a day ago | parent [-]

The original comment actually criticized Microsoft for a lack of investment to secure their paid and fairly lucrative service that they bought a popular code hosting platform to integrate with.

The opposite we see here: to not criticize them; to blame Microsoft's failure on the critics; and even to discourage any such criticism, are actually more like defending large companies.

miohtama 21 hours ago | parent [-]

It is a lucrative service just because people are lazy and keep buying from Microsoft. Otherwise, they would migrate to better alternatives.

This especially includes governments and other institutional buyers.

thrdbndndn a day ago | parent | prev [-]

I won't "defend" Microsoft in this case, but I am always annoyed by phrases like "world's biggest billion-dollar businesses... bablah".

Their size or past misbehaviors shouldn't be relevant to this discussion. Bringing those up feels a bit like an ad hominem. Whether criticism is valid should depend entirely on how GitHub Actions actually works and how it compares to similar services.

gcr a day ago | parent | next [-]

Ad hominem applies to people. Corporations aren’t people, and ICs aren’t corporations.

Sl1mb0 a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Microsoft's past behavior _may_ explain *why* there is a lack of investment in Github Actions; so yes, TheFeelz are relevant.

thrdbndndn a day ago | parent [-]

Then I agree with this. But still feel their size is irrelevant.

Tostino a day ago | parent [-]

Their size is relevant in so far as it allows them to make really any investment they want to in GHA without it causing a cash flow problem.

wizzwizz4 a day ago | parent | prev [-]

> Their size or past misbehaviors shouldn't be relevant to this discussion.

If the past misbehaviours are exactly the same shape, there's not all that much point re-hashing the same discussion with the nouns renamed.

ironmagma a day ago | parent | prev [-]

There is a massive problem in open source where some people equate pointing out a problem with being too lazy to solve it — when in reality this just stifles the conversation. Especially when a prerequisite to any group project accomplishing anything is to first discuss the problem to be solved.

rjzzleep a day ago | parent [-]

No that's actually a completely different issue. You're talking about volunteers working on side projects that are sometimes foundational to the way the internet works and then people feel entitled to tell them what to do without contributing.

Here we are talking about one of the worlds most valuable companies that gets all sorts of perks, benefits and preferential treatment from various entities and governments on the globe and somehow we have to be grateful when they deliver garbage while milking the business they bought.

ironmagma 19 hours ago | parent [-]

No, that's actually the same issue. "Entitled to tell them what to do without contributing" is not a problem. Let them tell whoever what to do, the response is always the same: "patches welcome," or if that isn't even true (which it doesn't have to be), "feel free to fork."

baq 19 hours ago | parent [-]

OTOH if you didn't pay for support you shouldn't expect support. 'patches welcome' is a very valid response.

ironmagma 18 hours ago | parent [-]

Is not the whole FOSS movement about receiving something you did not pay for? Going as far as to say that’s even what users deserve?

baq 18 hours ago | parent [-]

don't confuse 'receiving something you did not pay for' with 'being allowed to feel entitled to anything' is all. 'open source' is just that, nothing more. if you want a service with your source, be prepared to sponsor it.

ironmagma 16 hours ago | parent [-]

I still think people should want things and be vocal about what they want. This is the natural way for people to know what needs to be built. It is different from demanding something.

And besides that, a lot of people on here do pay for Github in the first place.

XCabbage a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Well, actually, no, not everyone is free to use alternatives. Anyone using CI for "Trusted Publishing" of packages to PyPI or npm needs to use GitHub Actions or GitLab CI/CD. CircleCI and Travis CI are not supported. So many big open source projects for the two most popular languages in the world are now locked out of the alternatives you propose.

(I find it extremely sketchy from a competition law perspective that Microsoft, as the owner of npm, has implemented a policy banning npm publishers from publishing via competitors to GitHub Actions - a product that Microsoft also owns. But they have; that is the reality right now, whether it's legal or not.)

woodruffw 20 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Trusted Publishing on PyPI supports Google Cloud and ActiveState as well. It’s not tied to GitHub or GitLab. To my recollection I looked at CircleCI support a while back, and ran into limitations on the claims they exposed.

(It can also be extended to arbitrary third party IdPs, although the benefit of that is dependent on usage. But if you have another CI/CD provider that you’d like to integrate into PyPI, you should definitely flag it on the issue tracker.)

LtWorf a day ago | parent | prev [-]

I was never convinced that trusted publishing solves any security problem, other than letting pypi eventually solve the problem of banning russian/iranian/whatever people just by relying on github doing it for them.

ChrisMarshallNY a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> unless they put the money where their mouth is, it's just noise

I used to work for a Japanese company, and one of their core philosophies was “Don’t complain, unless you have a solution.” In my experience, this did not always have optimal outcomes: https://littlegreenviper.com/problems-and-solutions/

hrimfaxi a day ago | parent [-]

My favorite retort to that is, "I don't have to know how to fix it to know my arm is broken."

ChrisMarshallNY a day ago | parent [-]

Stealing it...

klausa a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I don’t make the purchasing decision for my employer, but I certainly have to deal with their fallout, so I’ll keep complaining if that’s okay with you.

miohtama 21 hours ago | parent [-]

If you are not part of the solution, then you are part of the problem.

klausa 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

What is it that you actually want me to do here?

Just refuse to do my job because I think the tools suck?

weakfish 14 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

If you’re so lucky that your employer lets you use any $TOOL you want, great, but I _have_ to use GitHub actions.

So I’m part of the problem? Me specifically?

CamouflagedKiwi a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I've used CircleCI quite a bit in the past; it was pretty good. Feels tough for them to compete with GHA though when you're getting GHA credits for free with your code hosting.

I used Travis rather longer ago, it was not great. Circle was a massive step forward. I don't know if they have improved it since but it only felt useful for very simplistic workflows, as soon as you needed anything complex (including any software that didn't come out of the box) you were in a really awkward place.

olafmol a day ago | parent | next [-]

CircleCI made great steps the last few years, f.e. to better support proper DRY working, supporting OPA policies-as-code, VSCode extensions with "dry-run" options.

For some examples of more advanced usecases take a look: https://circleci.com/blog/platform-toolkit/

Disclaimer: i work for CircleCI.

aprilnya a day ago | parent | prev [-]

I mean, they do have a free plan with 6,000 minutes

gabrielgio a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Anyone can complain as much as they want, but unless they put the money where their mouth is, it's just noise from lazy people.

Once I'm encharged of budge decisions of my company I'll make sure that none will go to any MS and Atlassian product. Until then I'll keep complaining.

c0balt a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It should be highlighted that Gitlab CI/CD (self-hostable runner and GitLab itself) is also OSS.

Bombthecat a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I'm a huge fan of: https://onedev.io/ it might not the best, but it's fast it and does it's job!

koakuma-chan a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Or roll your own

dimgl a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I tried to use CircleCI and I gotta say, it is absolutely not better than GitHub Actions…

IshKebab a day ago | parent [-]

I have also used Travis. Ditto.

Github Actions is actually one of the better CI options out there, even if on an absolute scale it is still pretty bad.

As far as I can tell nobody has made a CI system that is actually good.

rileymichael 21 hours ago | parent | next [-]

buildkite is leaps and bounds above the others. especially if you need to really tailor your workloads to the change diff (say in a monorepo), the dynamic pipeline support is superb.

really surprised there are no others though. dagger.io was in the space but the level of complexity is an order of magnitude higher

kspacewalk2 a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

GitLab CI is pretty close to being actually good. Certainly less brittle than GitHub Actions from the looks of it...

IshKebab 15 hours ago | parent [-]

It's really not. I've used Gitlab CI extensively and the number of issues we had...

no_wizard a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

JetBrains TeamCity is pretty good IMHO

Marsymars 18 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I quite liked Bitrise for mobile apps when I used that.

NamlchakKhandro a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

CircleCI is 100% trash.

Don't waste your time

zulban a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It sounds like you've never worked in a large org before.

ramon156 a day ago | parent | prev [-]

according to travis-ci, Microsoft uses that? Lol

input_sh a day ago | parent [-]

You're falling for a marketing trick.

What that type of section usually means is "there's someone from Microsoft that signed up for our service using his work account", sometimes it means "there's some tiny team within Microsoft that uses our product", but it very rarely (if ever) means "the entire company is completely reliant on our product".

SkyPuncher a day ago | parent [-]

Yes and no. Generally logo usage requires permission. While the usage isn’t the whole company, it’s enough to justify some sort of logo usage.