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> I mean GH Actions is basically a re-brand of Microsoft's "Azure Pipelines". As somebody who used all previous incarnations of TFS/VSTS/AzDO build and release pipelines: they are not good at this. This is not a team with a record of success. That Azure Pipelines is moderately usable only happened because they failed literally every other approach they tried.

I was under the impression (which might be wrong!) that GHA was an independent project within GitHub that was well underway before the acquisition. Are you saying that GHA was rebuilt on top of AzP, that it's just a relabeling of AzP, or something else?

(I have no particular dog in it being one way or the other, but I'm curious about the history here.)

They share a lot of code. My understanding is that it was an MS project first, but I might have that backwards.

> GitHub Workflows execute on runners. The runner code is essentially a fork of the Azure Pipelines code, so it's very similar. It's also cross-platform and you can also use hosted or self-hosted runners.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/architecture/devops...

Thanks for the link -- I knew that GHA workflow runs ran on Azure, but I didn't know the workflow runner itself was a fork of Azure's runner/instrumentor. That's interesting context!

if you look at the source of the GHA runner, you can see where they regex-replace all references to Azure Pipelines with GitHub Actions lol

the original GHA implementation was shitcanned

Is that a nice way of saying we are still stuck with the original GHA implementation

> GH Actions is basically a re-brand of Microsoft's "Azure Pipelines"

Probably even moreso than most people think - a large portion of the AzDo team got moved over after the acquisition to work on GitHub Actions/Projects.

You had me up til that last paragraph.

Call me crazy but xml just hurts my eyes. I'll always take a nicely formatted yaml doc with all the pains that come with it over the horrors of angle brackets and camel case.

XML syntax is bad, but yaml doesn't have a proper blessed batteries-included built-in schema language afaik. A well formed XML with an xmlns will have validation and autocomplete in a good editor thanks to this. JSON can do it too. Never seen it done with yaml.

It's a pretty big frustration in a language that is so slow to test -- commit push run wait find the error oh I made a typo. Better code-time validation fixes this but the tooling for that in yaml is weak.