Maybe I have low standards given I've never touched what gitlab or CircleCi have to offer, but compared to my past experiences with Buildbot, Jenkins and Travis, it's miles ahead of these in my opinion.
Am I missing a truly better alternative or CI systems simply are all kind of a pita?
I don't enough experience w/ Buildbot or Travis to comment on those, but Jenkins?
I get that it got the job done and was standard at one point, but every single Jenkins instance I've seen in the wild is a steaming pile of ... unpatched, unloved, liability. I've come to understand that it isn't necessarily Jenkins at fault, it's teams 'running' their own infrastructure as an afterthought, coupled with the risk of borking the setup at the 'wrong time', which is always. From my experience this pattern seems nearly universal.
Github actions definitely has its warts and missing features, but I'll take managed build services over Jenkins every time.
Jenkins was just build in pre-container way so a lot of stuff (unless you specifically make your jobs use containers) is dependent on setup of machine running jenkins. But that does make some things easier, just harder to make repeatable as you pretty much configuration management solution to keep the jenkins machine config repeatable.
And yes "we can't be arsed to patch it till it's problem" is pretty much standard for any on-site infrastructure that doesn't have ops people yelling at devs to keep it up to date, but that's more SaaS vs onsite benefit than Jenkins failing.
My issue with Github CI is that it doesn't run your code in a container. You just have github-runner-1 user and you need to manually check out repository, do your build and clean up after you're done with it. Very dirty and unpredictable. That's for self-hosted runner.
> You just have github-runner-1 user and you need to manually check out repository, do your build and clean up after you're done with it. Very dirty and unpredictable. That's for self-hosted runner.
Yeah checking out everytime is a slight papercut I guess, but I guess it gives you control as sometimes you don't need to checkout anything or want a shallow/full clone. I guess if it checked out for you then their would be other papercuts.
I use their runners so never need to do any cleanup and get a fresh slate everytime.
Man :| no. I genuinely understand the convenience of using Actions, but it's a horrible product.