They slowly started locking down the platform for people without accounts and it has been really annoying to use the website since. First it was not possible to search for code, then even searching for issues got more and more difficult with it randomly failing, and now it's gotten to the point where I can't search for a fucking project anymore!
Github's search is becoming as bad as reddit's, where if you want to find anything, a secondary service like SourceGraph, GrepApp, or even a dumb search engine is better. Sometimes those haven't indexed what I need (especially code search), so I have to download the bloody tarball and rg for whatever the fuck it is I was looking for.
Sometimes it will also block the VPN I'm using, so I have to proxy to a non-VPNed machine. The world could do without these unnecessary roadblocks.
What also grinds my gears is requiring an account to contribute. There is no way to send in a patch, raise an issue, or anything without an account there, so by if a project being on github, you have no choice but to give Microsoft your data to participate in opensource. Don't get me wrong, mailing-lists are filth, but and I'd rather claw my eyes out than participate in any project demanding their use, but Microsoft being the "lesser evil" is not a good look.
Please, for the love of opensource, get your project off of github, please. It's a monopoly at this point and doing microsoft things. This isn't the end and they'll probably do more stuff to see how far they can push it. We'll all be the boiled frogs.
Yes, I know they have a CI and some other features, but if all you're doing is hosting your code, please consider an alternative.
Possible alternatives in alphabetic order:
- Codeberg (could have federation in the future)
- Gitlab (has CI)
- ~~OneDev (no git SSH clone but feature-rich)~~ not an instance for the public
- Radicle (no CI, but federated)
- Sourcehut (minimalist, but fast as fuck)
or maybe others will suggest more.
Github actions are terrible - fight me.
act drastically reduced the amount of back-and-forth getting actions right for me
It's an interesting idea - but I've not been able to get it to work. Some of that is due to us using "GitHub Enterprise" which is somehow MUCH worse than the normal hosted GitHub - but we get to pay more for it! I haven't tried it with "normal" github.com actions yet - does it deal well with shared workflows and custom builders?
It does with some hoops IIRC. I used act a couple of years ago to test a very distributed flow for enterprise IaC projects. I can’t remember all of the things we had to do and I think I’m conflating some of the podman issues we had on macOS with act issues. AWS credentials were an annoyance, I think, but we worked around it with some community code. Our primary purpose for act was to be the local testing for enterprise action deployment so I’d guess it’s close to yours. I think our conclusion was to distribute the actions to each repo rather than use the central
.githubrepo for actions because of how GitHub handles overrides. My memory is really fuzzy.If you’re going to believe this internet stranger, start with a very simple set of demos to vet me. I remember being very happy; I do not remember how the team solved it. M
As with all things GH Actions related - "it kinda works if you struggle with it for a while". If I get some spare time I may tinker with it a bit then - knowing things are "possible" is a good start. ;-)
It's my biggest complaint with GH Actions - death by a thousand paper-cuts. It's not that it does any one thing wrong (though the way "shared workflows" work is pretty abysmal) it's that everything hurts a little to work with. At least if you're not building an open source project freely shared on github.com and using all public actions.
Totally agree. I’m glad you read between the lines there. It’s out there if you have the resources to throw at it.
Like most DevOps things, it’s all about the opinionated ecosystem you hop in. It has most things and does most of the stuff you want until you decide to adapt the pattern to your use case and holy fucking shit is it hard to adapt opinionated ecosystems. That’s why I continue to have jobs.