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

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

#241

Post by dangus »

wharvle wrote: post #99
dangus wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This idea that design peaked in the 90s does a big hand wave over a whole bunch of horrible examples of the user interface from that era. Is the Space Jam website peak UI design? What about Microsoft’s “hell of tabs” settings dialog boxes? Or the original Amazon home page: https://www.versionmuseum.com/images/websites/amazon-website... What link do I click to find my order status? Where do I go to search for a book b…

Desktop program UI design mostly peaked in the 90s (search-to-launch becoming ubiquitous is about the only really good thing to happen since then). Desktop web design peaked somewhat later, in the two- and three-column era. ‘00s. It was nice when most sites looked and worked about the same way, and that way also happened to have great info density for a desktop screen. Mobile web design, I’m not sure it’s had a peak…

> Phone os UI peak was iOS6.

I couldn't disagree more strongly with this.

The UI can't just be considered on its own without a discussion of the underlying functionality that it presents. iOS6 is like a caveman's OS compared to what today's OS versions can accomplish.

So it may be true that iOS felt simple and intuitive, but it was also presenting so much less functionality that it really makes broad comparisons seem disingenuous.

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

#242

Post by dangus »

indymike wrote: post #113
dangus wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This idea that design peaked in the 90s does a big hand wave over a whole bunch of horrible examples of the user interface from that era. Is the Space Jam website peak UI design? What about Microsoft’s “hell of tabs” settings dialog boxes? Or the original Amazon home page: https://www.versionmuseum.com/images/websites/amazon-website... What link do I click to find my order status? Where do I go to search for a book b…

Confusing web design and desktop UI design in the 90s does little to dispute the assertion that desktop UI design peaked in the 90s. In the late 90s, the browser was completely new - so there was a lot of skeuomorphism, borrowing from other media to try to make the web work well. Space Jam's format was familiar, though to users of multimedia CD-ROM and other interactive hypermedia of the era. The desktop application…

I'm not confusing web and desktop UI design. I presented examples of both areas that were miseralbe in the 90's.

There was not consistency between applications back then, only if you cherry-pick the ones that you like. Every Java GUI application would have a completely different UI from the base OS. Programs like America Online, RealPlayer, WinAmp, and Microsoft Bob, and Windows Media Player 7 and above would completely ignore existing OS conventions. Many programs had a habit of making the entire user interface out of bitmaps and only having a menu bar as the last vestige of the OS.

Websites might have been easier for developers to build, but they did almost nothing in comparison to what you can do with a web application now. Did Microsoft Word run entirely in a web browser like it does today? Were there any maps and driving directions where you could scroll the map without refreshing the page or order a taxi and visualize its progress? Remember typing your address into MapQuest and printing out your static map and directions list?

Arguably, delivering a 90's web app experience doesn't even require writing HTML code anymore and is therefore far easier than it was in the 90's.

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

#243

Post by zzyzxd »

tcangussu wrote: post #232
zzyzxd wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is a plugin for everything under the sun Yeah, that's the biggest problem. Almost every thing you need for a CI system comes in the format of a plugin, because Jenkins core is too simple. You can't always say no to your developers' plugin requests, because many of them are actually very reasonable. Now you install one simple plugin, and it comes with 10 dependency plugins, and that's when your nightmare begin…

You can use jcasc (Jenkins configuration as code) with regular shell jobs, or Jenkins Job Builder, to name two alternatives "in between".

I am not sure if managing groovy/xml job definitions in a giant yaml file (where all your Jenkins core/plugin configuration live) is easier than Jenkinsfile in repositories.

Jenkins Job Builder can't configure plugins.

There are ways to do job templating, but last time I checked, they were either not powerful enough, or too complex that I would rather writing groovy.

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

#244

Post by ak217 »

capableweb wrote: post #230
ak217 wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. Out of those, I think only "composable workflow definitions" would be one of the features that other CI platforms didn't have, before GitLab even existed as a project. You might want to re-read the history and features of build platforms be…

I'm very familiar with the history of CI platforms before GitLab, having used Hudson, Jenkins, Circle, Travis, Appveyor, Codebuild, and a whole bunch of other platforms extensively. While some of them had these features, none of them had all of the features, few of them meaningfully integrated the features together, and most of them provided the features in a very half-assed and unreliable way.

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

#245

Post by baud147258 »

We're using Jenkins at work. For building artifacts, it's alright as our use case is simple. But then we're also using for our automated tests, which were alredy kind of a dumpster fire in terms of reliability (both because of mistakes made when automated testing was put into place and because of issues inherent to our product) and I don't think Jenkins is helping a lot here, even after consequent investment in dev time.

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

#246

Post by codethief »

nijave wrote: post #236
codethief wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Random example: I want to define a setup job to build & push a base Docker image to our container registry. I then want to use this image as IMAGE in all subsequent jobs. This is impossible because the IMAGE field in YAML cannot be dynamic (determined at runtime) but I'd like to version/tag my image using the $CI_COMMIT_SHA.

Can't you use build time variables for this? https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/variables/#pass-an-environment...

I tried this but it didn't work.

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

#247

Post by seadan83 »

j1elo wrote: post #169
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…

I'm in the apparently small group of people who ignores 90% of the made & shared features, and push back against making internal ops to depend too much to any particular CI system. We know how to build, package, and release our software, and at work I firmly support that we write those operations as standalone scripts that in principle could even run in the developer's machine itself. Moving them to CI is just changi…

Agree, I like to have a top level "verify" script that does all checks and have CI run exclusively and minimally that one script. Ideally the verify script is just a wrapper around a build and test command

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

#248

Post by wharvle »

dangus wrote: post #241
wharvle wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Desktop program UI design mostly peaked in the 90s (search-to-launch becoming ubiquitous is about the only really good thing to happen since then). Desktop web design peaked somewhat later, in the two- and three-column era. ‘00s. It was nice when most sites looked and worked about the same way, and that way also happened to have great info density for a desktop screen. Mobile web design, I’m not sure it’s had a peak…

> Phone os UI peak was iOS6. I couldn't disagree more strongly with this. The UI can't just be considered on its own without a discussion of the underlying functionality that it presents. iOS6 is like a caveman's OS compared to what today's OS versions can accomplish. So it may be true that iOS felt simple and intuitive, but it was also presenting so much less functionality that it really makes broad comparisons seem…

Most of the important functionality that’s been added didn’t require the changes to UI that I consider a downgrade.

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

#249

Post by devopseng85 »

codethief wrote: post #234
devopseng85 wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am surprised to hear this as well. We had Jenkins in my previous gig. It worked, but I spend all my time keeping it humming and learnt nothing else. In my current gig, we were a Drone shop. We switched to Harness CI enterprise and it’s worked really well for us. Their hosted builds are pretty speedy! We did evaluate Gitlab CI but went with Drone. Gitlab CI is not a top 5 CI vendor IMO.

I'm not following. You're surprised to hear complaints about Gitlab, even though you're not actually using Gitlab (in fact, you say "Gitlab CI is not a top 5 CI vendor IMO") and you are praising a completely different product (Harness CI)?

Oh, I meant I was surprised Gitlab is a good CI vendor. Lol.

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

#250

Post by Smaug123 »

intelVISA wrote: post #201
Smaug123 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The Nix language is awful. The Nix idea is The Best. When the CLI stabilisation work lands to separate out the store-manipulation plumbing commands from the porcelain Nixlang-related stuff, I have hope that a usable frontend will appear.
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