[supriyo-biswas]

TBH this discussion and the need for a lockfile for your CI makes me dizzy, is there something I'm missing wrt GHA that makes it awesome enough to be worth these tradeoffs?

For reference, I come from a Gitlab CI background and all I want is to specify a container, and the CI system should clone my repo in it and run some tests; perhaps optionally allow me to write stuff in a text file that can be displayed on the pull request or the commit (although Gitlab CI doesn't do that AFAIK). Is there something I'm missing due to which GHA architecture is so complicated?

[larusso]

Maybe the few dozen developers not working on something that can be build with Linux only?

[anon7000]

Yeah, GHA has a massive plugin ecosystem. A common pattern is using an “action” from a plugin as one CI step/job. So these are dependencies that get resolved at runtime when GHA puts together your workload.

Other CI platforms have plugins, but the “plugins” in GitHub really get used as the core primitive of the system, which is part of what makes it so simple & easy to use… for really basic workflows. You just hook up a couple actions like this and you’re good to go, no shell scripting required. (Though you can totally do that too.)

I mean at the end of the day, it’s a big part of the value proposition, even if I prefer a much more bare metal approach. GHA is really not great at massive CI workloads.