Complexity for its own sake

Turns out I just discovered how GitHub actions work when I started setting them up in Gitea. OH. MY. GOD.

I spent quite some time wondering about the sheer audacity of fetching action implementations from GitHub. OK, not a big deal, I can do that manually and put them into Gitea so at least it doesn’t try going out to GitHub each time.

But then.

The next error message from the test workflow in the Gitea docs came just after a successful checkout:

Cannot find: node in PATH

So simple. So … deceiving.

OK, something that should be in $PATH isn’t. A bit weird to call a path entry a file system node, but whatever.

To find out what it was that I was missing, I looked at the implementation of actions/checkout.

…

(Look away now, kids, this isn’t good for you.)

…

THE BL@@DY CHECKOUT ACTION THAT NEEDS TO RUN ONE, COUNT ‘EM, ONE, GIT COMMAND LINE IS WRITTEN AS SOME FIFTEEN TYPESCRIPT FILES THAT WANT TO BE RUN WITH NODE.JS?!?

ARE YOU F@@@ING KIDDING ME?!? TRUMP HIMSELF COULD NOT HAVE COME UP WITH ANYTHING EVEN APPROACHING THIS UTTER BENIGHTEDNESS!

No wonder everything takes ages these days despite our computers being immeasurably faster than Way Back When.

I’m … let’s call it flummoxed. That is certainly a nicer word than several others I have in mind.

Would the authors of actions/checkout please consider rewriting this … this THING in a saner, and more preserving of its user’s sanity, way?

Thank you. I’ll go cry in the corner now.

i’m scared to look at any others