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Comment by technion | Hacker News Reader

Github actions is the one that surprised me. It's a recent enough invention that it was built long after all these discussions, issues raised, and alternatives proposed.

I've had far more issues getting these YAML files correctly formatted than I should admit, and every test means pushing a commit and waiting to see what happens.

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And one of the root keys in a GitHub action is "on" which will get turned into True by a compliant parser if unquoted

Only if you use a yaml 1.1 parser. Yaml 1.2 changed the behavior of how booleans are parsed, but it's only been 13 years since it was released, so I get why people might not have migrated to it yet.

This sounds like an example of the problem: It's not up to me to migrate, we're using a third party service and I have no idea what version of Yaml Github Action's parser users. I read this guide and can't find a version referenced anywhere:

https://docs.github.com/en/actions/using-workflows/workflow-...

It refers you to this YAML guide, which itself never mentions what version it's helping you learn:

https://learnxinyminutes.com/docs/yaml/

> and every test means pushing a commit and waiting to see what happens.

I use nekos act to run workflows locally (and it does not support reusable workflows), but it sure helped me to get the yaml right.

YAML lets you easily embed sh scripts

  run: |
    mkdir build && build
    cmake ..

etc. This is great for CI.

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