[orf]

With great power comes great responsibility, and the responsibility to maintain what started out as “a few lines of groovy” is not one I’d ever take up again.

There’s a middle ground between overly flexible and very constrained, and I think GitHub actions nails that.

Individual steps/actions are reusable components with clear interfaces, which is tied together by a simple workflow engine. This decoupling is great, and allows independent evolution.

As a point to this: GitHub actions doesn’t even offer git clone functionality: it doesn’t care about it. Everyone uses the core “GitHub/checkout” action, but there is nothing special about it.

The same for caching - the workflow/steps engine doesn’t give two shits about that. The end result of this decoupling is things like sccache and docker can offer native integrations with the cache system, because it’s a separate thing.