| Creator of Jenkins here. First of all, this is a Google Summer of Code project. Abhishek, who is driving this work, is doing a great work, so I hope people can give him encouragements and feedbacks to push him forward. I'll make sure he sees those feedbacks and will stop by to answer questions you might have. This is one of the efforts that is pushing the envelop of Jenkins that solve problems people had with Jenkins. Reading some of the reactions here, I wanted to use this opportunity to introduce other bigger efforts going on currently in Jenkins that I think addresses various points raised in this thread. * Jenkins Essentials is aiming to be the kind of "readily usable out of the box" Jenkins distribution that is a lot less fragile, because it's self-updating appliance that has sane defaults and obvious path to success. * There's architecture effort going on to change the deep guts of Jenkins so that data won't have to be on the file system, and instead go to managed data services. * Jenkins configuration as code lets you define the entire Jenkins configuration in YAML and launch Jenkins as a docker container to do immutable infra. Jenkins Pipeline lets you define your pipeline in your Git repo, so that's the other part of immutable infra, and between modern pipeline and efforts liek this one, there's no need to write Groovy per se. It's just a configuration syntax based on brackets like nginx, which happens to conform to Groovy syntax, so that when you need to do a little bit of complicated stuff you can, but you don't need to * Finally, Jenkins X is focused on making CD a whole lot easier for people using and developing apps for Kubernetes. It's a great example of how the community can take advantages of the flexibility & the OSS nature of Jenkins to the advantages of users. * A few people mention about container-based build environment, which is very much a central paradigm with modern Jenkins (and thus obviously with Jenkins Essentials and Jenkins X.) See our very first page of the tutorial! https://jenkins.io/doc/pipeline/tour/hello-world/ |
I remember when I installed the git plugin, which forced the credentials plugin to update, which caused runtime failures in communication with some other core plugin, so we reverted the install/update, which broke the whole system because the update had renamed fields in the configuration and the old version didn't understand them...
Since then, I have always updated all core plugins together in lockstep. Based on the name and description, that sounds like what Jenkins Essentials would do too. If so, that's a good sign.
Simpler, more reliable administration is exactly what Jenkins needs and you seem to have a credible way of achieving it, so I'm excited to see the results.