Hacker News Reader

Comment by demizer | Hacker News Reader

Jenkins is rock solid. Been using it for three years to deliver highly critical software. The development experience is the worst of all ci tools since no one wants to setup jenkinspipelineunit to test the pipelines. Dagger might be the salvation here, but even that tool didn't support Jenkins out of the gate. And for those that are reading this, the statement about pipeline groovy being a trap is exactly right. Avoid writing groovy at all costs. No one on the team wants to get good groovy and if you do, you're weird. The way we do it is to just use the Jenkins file to call the scripts (or tools) with bare minimal script code.

Edit, forgot to add that I recently interviewed a bunch of candidates for a high paying job at a ai hardware company and every one of those candidates stated they worked on or near a project that involved moving from Jenkins to Gitlab CI.

View on HN

> And for those that are reading this, the statement about pipeline groovy being a trap is exactly right. Avoid writing groovy at all costs.

I disagree with this pretty strongly. I've worked with Jenkins where it was all freestyle jobs and it was a nightmare to maintain. Pipelines written in groovy are essential to doing Jenkins well, imo. It's also not exactly hard to write groovy. It's basically Java, not some weird esoteric language nobody knows.

I'd suggest you wait until you spend a whole day on script approval and @NonCPS idiosyncrasies before you define Jenkins pipeline Groovy DSL as "basically Java". This doesn't mean you shouldn't be writing it, you should — but for the reasons completely different from its supposed "similarity to Java".

For anyone who thinks JavaScript or yaml has funky implicit conversions and comparison rules, wait until you hear about “Groovy truth”.

Theres also the limitation that functions can be max 1000 bytes or whatever I don’t remember. Managing shared libs and testing them is not easy.

It’s not basically Java at all. Everything is subtly different and will surprise you in the least convenient moment.

> Avoid writing groovy at all costs. No one on the team wants to get good groovy and if you do, you're weird.

I guess I'm weird then, having produced about 100K LoC in Groovy over the last couple of years.

We'd move to Gitlab CI too — if it was anywhere near resembling a serious tool and not a sandbox toy collection.

Oh ye keep it simple. I worked as a Jenkins admin for half a year and one day I woke up from a nightmare and realized that I've made some sort of parallelization batch job processor communicating via outputting bat-files, in Groovy, to cut down build times.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com