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Comment by duped | Hacker News Reader

If this is the vision, please let us write actions directly with typescript or some legitimate programming language (not YAML). It is currently impossible to debug and reuse action code.

I am working on an entire company migration off GitHub actions because it cannot scale. Full programmatic control and local debugging that allows me to reuse and test code in a single repository would have justified staying with GH.

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You can already do that in a few ways like with docker or the run command. It’s been there from the beginning. YAML is just the config.

https://docs.github.com/en/actions/reference/workflow-syntax...

Those only work at the actions level. I need them at the workflow level. The biggest issue here is the differentiation between actions and workflows, I need my workflows to be treated as actions and reuse entire segments of them. This isn't possible without copy/pasting code.

I also need arbitrary logic to configure and run my workflows (like an else branch... that would be nice).

This is in large part why Team City and Jenkins beat out Actions when we reevaluated.

The YAML file is not a config file in the workflows I have written, it is the top level program calling many other programs. The syntax limitations (and unsafety of its interpreter) make that unwieldy. But it's not possible to workaround without never using any other action in the marketplace, which kind of defeats the purpose of using actions at all.

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