What's hilarious about that script is that the solution is so simple: use a less-than comparison instead of an equals. That's really, really all it would have taken to fix the issue. And yet https://github.com/actions/runner/pull/3157 was opened on 2024-02-17 and was merged on 2025-08-21, a full 18 months (plus a few days) later! It took literally 18 months for them to merge a bugfix that is trivially obvious to see is correct.
Yeah, the problems at GitHub ran (and still run) deep.
P.S. Yes, there are busy-wait issues in that code, which should have been addressed by bringing back the check for the `sleep` command and using it if available, falling back on the CPU-burning busy-wait only if `sleep` was unavailable. But the most revealing thing is the 18 months to merge a trivial-to-verify PR. That, more than the bad busy-wait loop, is the fundamental indicator of brokenness at GitHub under Microsoft's ownership.
What's hilarious about that script is that the solution is so simple: use a less-than comparison instead of an equals. That's really, really all it would have taken to fix the issue. And yet https://github.com/actions/runner/pull/3157 was opened on 2024-02-17 and was merged on 2025-08-21, a full 18 months (plus a few days) later! It took literally 18 months for them to merge a bugfix that is trivially obvious to see is correct.
Yeah, the problems at GitHub ran (and still run) deep.
P.S. Yes, there are busy-wait issues in that code, which should have been addressed by bringing back the check for the `sleep` command and using it if available, falling back on the CPU-burning busy-wait only if `sleep` was unavailable. But the most revealing thing is the 18 months to merge a trivial-to-verify PR. That, more than the bad busy-wait loop, is the fundamental indicator of brokenness at GitHub under Microsoft's ownership.