Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The worst thing about Jenkins is that it works (2019)

twitchard.github.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 275 posts

Re: The worst thing about Jenkins is that it works (2019)

#201

Post by intelVISA »

Smaug123 wrote: post #120
krick wrote: post #70

Well, to be fair, pretty much each of these points apply to all other CI tools in existence.

Jenkins is, like, uniquely awful though. Aside from the sheer staggering number of bugs in its core functionality (I encounter on average maybe one bug per new pipeline I write), it is also configured in almost the worst language I've ever touched (considerably worse than Nix, for example, which is really saying something). "Blue Ocean is Incomplete and Unintuitive" is entirely correct - you have to drop back to the…

Nix is The Best though?

Re: The worst thing about Jenkins is that it works (2019)

#202

Post by ttt3ts »

SOLAR_FIELDS wrote: post #197
dig1 wrote: post #20

Jenkins is not perfect by any means, but I can say it is much better than existing solutions (taking pros and cons after trying and using many of them). Sure, it doesn't have fancy UI or flying buttons, nor is it rust/PWA/react/whatever-rage-is-these-days, but it does its job - it works, is free, and has been very well-maintained for ages. Download a single file and run it. Want to extend it? There is a plugin for ev…

Jenkins, like many CI tools, is fine when you are maintaining 1-5 builds. Sure, your artisanal bash script pasted into the shell run of the Jenkins gui is stable and it just works. When you go beyond that is when everything falls apart. And by fall apart I mean your org starts to grow to a technical ci debt by a thousand cuts until its taking some teams hours to build and ship their code or debug a spaghetti string o…

My 10 year old Jenkins build still runs. My CircleCI build.... less so...

Re: The worst thing about Jenkins is that it works (2019)

#203

Post by Riverheart »

solardev wrote: post #52

Does Jenkins let you test workflows locally? That's the thing I hate that about CircleCI, Github Actions, etc... having to "commit, upload, wait" to test every minor change =/

Jenkins has a “Replay” button on completed jobs and allows you to edit the Jenkinsfile before rerunning it. That is the easiest way to test changes without going through version control.

Re: The worst thing about Jenkins is that it works (2019)

#204

Post by eternityforest »

Sophistifunk wrote: post #199

As somebody who has spent his share of time interacting with Jenkins as a user, and messing around inside it as a developer, I am definitely biased. For or against, I'm not sure tho ;-) But the problem with Jenkins is the problem with all CI. Our (software in general, not Jenkins specifically) build process are all godforsaken nightmares that would put HP Lovecraft and Rube Goldberg into rubber rooms. You can't add a…

Maybe it's time for languages themselves to start defining what CI means, the way they currently define how builds and packages work.

They already include test frameworks.

It would be cool to have, at least as an experiment, a language with no snowflake horrors at all, if it runs at all, it's in the language or framework's One True Way All Tools Understand. Static typing, maybe even linter warnings as fatal errors, anything that makes adding CI a hassle just doesn't exist.

Maybe it could even refuse to run without full test coverage.

So you could take any project at all, click "Turn on CI" and that's that, there's only one CI config that exists.

I'm guessing the number of use cases would be tiny to nonexistant in the startup centric tech world, but they might be some of the least stressful projects ever made!

Re: The worst thing about Jenkins is that it works (2019)

#205

Post by intelVISA »

ysofunny wrote: post #57

the worst think about Java (in general, Jenkins is Java) is that it solves a real problem that companies have. I put, however, that only companies have the problem, not programmers, and not even regular (sized) engineering teams; except when they have a fast employee turnover speed. I do not have a very clear idea, but roughly speaking I'm saying that java does really well in the "too many engineers are working on th…

Isn't Go the New Java in that sense? I am no fan but it seems industrial strength for this kinda use case.

Re: The worst thing about Jenkins is that it works (2019)

#206

Post by esafak »

ttt3ts wrote: post #202
SOLAR_FIELDS wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jenkins, like many CI tools, is fine when you are maintaining 1-5 builds. Sure, your artisanal bash script pasted into the shell run of the Jenkins gui is stable and it just works. When you go beyond that is when everything falls apart. And by fall apart I mean your org starts to grow to a technical ci debt by a thousand cuts until its taking some teams hours to build and ship their code or debug a spaghetti string o…

My 10 year old Jenkins build still runs. My CircleCI build.... less so...

I bet companies have years old zombie pipelines running without anyone's knowledge because Jenkins lacks discoverability.

Re: The worst thing about Jenkins is that it works (2019)

#207

Post by ak217 »

capableweb wrote: post #68
hardwaresofton wrote: post #55

Gitlab CI is still the best CI in the game IMO, but GitHub Actions gives it an incredible run for it's money because of how easy action re-use is. I meant to make a blog post about this, but here's a good a place as any: GitLab absolutely innovated many hard parts of CI/CD as a platform-native piece, but it feels like they lose slightly to GitHub on what GitHub does best -- social virality for developers. The problem…

> GitLab absolutely innovated many hard parts of CI/CD as a platform-native piece As someone who only used GitLabs CI briefly when it initially launched, what hard parts did they innovate on exactly? As far as I could tell, it's a run-of-the-mill CI/CD platform, for better or worse, but nothing I'd call "innovative". But again, maybe since the first time I tried it when it launched, it has changed, and I missed somet…

They integrated in-repo configuration, self-hosted runners, composable workflow definitions, a robust API, and container building and registries for the first time in a CI tool.

Of course GitHub came and blew that out of the water with a composable social actions ecosystem. Which was brilliant and remains the killer feature that puts GitHub far beyond reach of other CI platforms, especially now that they've improved in-repo composability a few months ago.

Re: The worst thing about Jenkins is that it works (2019)

#208

Post by [deleted] »

lmm wrote: post #172
gjvc wrote: post #2

Avoid Jenkins, and if you can, try https://www.jetbrains.com/teamcity "TeamCity Professional is free – even for commercial use – and has no limitations on features, number of users, or build time. It allows you to configure up to 100 builds and run up to 3 builds in parallel, which is more than enough for most projects"

TeamCity is even worse than Jenkins. Jenkins randomly breaks and you can eventually fix it, or kludge some kind of workaround. TeamCity randomly breaks and you call support and they can't fix it.

[deleted]

Re: The worst thing about Jenkins is that it works (2019)

#209

Post by Sophistifunk »

eternityforest wrote: post #204
Sophistifunk wrote: post #199

As somebody who has spent his share of time interacting with Jenkins as a user, and messing around inside it as a developer, I am definitely biased. For or against, I'm not sure tho ;-) But the problem with Jenkins is the problem with all CI. Our (software in general, not Jenkins specifically) build process are all godforsaken nightmares that would put HP Lovecraft and Rube Goldberg into rubber rooms. You can't add a…

Maybe it's time for languages themselves to start defining what CI means, the way they currently define how builds and packages work. They already include test frameworks. It would be cool to have, at least as an experiment, a language with no snowflake horrors at all, if it runs at all, it's in the language or framework's One True Way All Tools Understand. Static typing, maybe even linter warnings as fatal errors, a…

The problem is that a real green-field re-imagination of software development needs to go back to the 70s, and back to the (these days mostly fake) metal, meaning it's a massive job that will take years to even know if you might make it. You need to start with something simple-but-useless, and grow it from there, rather than attacking a single layer or two of our current enormous tower of babel. It will be difficult to adopt because it must by definition be alien to our current workflows, and it will take forever to find users. The only way to find success is to slowly and surely build something that is so obviously good existing devs will be willing to give up tools in which they've invested years and (for many of them) their identities, just to play with it.

It requires an iron clad vision, willingness to be a pariah among the coding masses and a dictator internally, excellent communication in order to present the vision and progress to the outsiders who are interested, and piles and piles of money to pay for it for years before it becomes sustainable, however you plan to make it so.

Re: The worst thing about Jenkins is that it works (2019)

#210

Post by gregopet »

dagmx wrote: post #64

I truly, truly dislike Jenkins but haven’t found a better locally hosting CI system that is repo agnostic. My issues with Jenkins: 1. Groovy is a really annoying language to configure stuff in. I’ve never written it for other things but it has so many little idiosyncrasies that catch you out. 2. Jenkins doesn’t have much in the way of resource management. It’s easy for a job to take over the entire node and Jenkins d…

I've written web servers in Groovy for at least 5 years.. Groovy is great, once you get to know it, but some aspects of its design certainly don't "click" for a while. I'd be using a syntax for years when I'd read in some blog post "Oh that's just xyz with a shorter syntax" and I'd go Ooooh!

Great little language though, IMHO one of the best for quick prototyping.

Post reply on HN