I can’t overstate how much I hate GitHub Actions. I don’t even remember hating any other piece of technology I used. Sure, I still make fun of PHP that I remember from times of PHP41, but even then I didn’t hate it. Merely I found it subpar technology to other emerging at the time (like Ruby on Rails or Django). And yet I hate GitHub Actions. With Passion2. Road to Hell Day before writing these words I was implementing build.rs for my tmplr project. To save you a click - it is a file/project scaffold tool with human readable (and craftable) template files. I (personally) use it very often, given how easy it is to craft new templates, by hand or with aid of the tool, so check it out if you need a similar tool.

I can’t overstate how much I hate GitHub Actions. I don’t even remember hating any other piece of technology I used. Sure, I still make fun of PHP that I remember from times of PHP41, but even then I didn’t hate it. Merely I found it subpar technology to other emerging at the time (like Ruby on Rails or Django). And yet I hate GitHub Actions.
With Passion2.

Road to Hell
Day before writing these words I was implementing build.rs for my tmplr project. To save you a click - it is a file/project scaffold tool with human readable (and craftable) template files. I (personally) use it very often, given how easy it is to craft new templates, by hand or with aid of the tool, so check it out if you need a similar tool.

  • tal@lemmy.todayEnglish
    4·
    5 hours ago

    Yes. For a single change. Like having an editor with 2 minute save lag, pushing commit using program running on cassette tapes4 or playing chess over snail-mail. It’s 2026 for Pete’s sake, and we5 won’t tolerate this behavior!

    Now of course, in some Perfect World, GitHub could have a local runner with all the bells and whistles. Or maybe something that would allow me to quickly check for progress upon the push6 or even something like a “scratch commit”, i.e. a way that I could testbed different runs without polluting history of both Git and Action runs.

    For the love of all that is holy, don’t let GitHub Actions manage your logic. Keep your scripts under your own damn control and just make the Actions call them!

    I don’t use GitHub Actions and am not familiar with it, but if you’re using it for continuous integration or build stuff, I’d think that it’s probably a good idea to have that decoupled from GitHub anyway, unless you want to be unable to do development without an Internet connection and access to GitHub.

    I mean, I’d wager that someone out there has already built some kind of system to do this for git projects. If you need some kind of isolated, reproducible environment, maybe Podman or similar, and just have some framework to run it?

    like macOS builds that would be quite hard to get otherwise

    Does Rust not do cross-compilation?

    searches

    It looks like it can.

    https://rust-lang.github.io/rustup/cross-compilation.html

    I guess maybe MacOS CI might be a pain to do locally on a non-MacOS machine. You can’t just freely redistribute MacOS.

    goes looking

    Maybe this?

    https://www.darlinghq.org/

    Darling is a translation layer that lets you run macOS software on Linux

    That sounds a lot like Wine

    And it is! Wine lets you run Windows software on Linux, and Darling does the same for macOS software.

    As long as that’s sufficient, I’d think that you could maybe run MacOS CI in Darling in Podman? Podman can run on Linux, MacOS, Windows, and BSD, and if you can run Darling in Podman, I’d think that you’d be able to run MacOS stuff on whatever.

    • setsubyou@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      50 minutes ago

      You could also just only use Macs. In theory ARM Macs let you build and test for macOS (host or vm), Linux (containers or vm), Windows (vm), iOS (simulator or connected device), and Android (multiple options), both ARM and x86-64.

      At least in theory. I think in practice I’d go mad. Not from the Linux part though. That part just works because podman on ARM Macs will transparently use emulation for x86 containers by default. (You can get the same thing on Linux too with qemu-user-static btw., for a lot more architectures too.)

      • tal@lemmy.todayEnglish
        1·
        2 minutes ago

        You could also just only use Macs.

        I actually don’t know what the current requirement is. Back in the day, Apple used to build some of the OS — like QuickDraw — into the ROMs, so unless you had a physical Mac, not just a purchased copy of MacOS, you couldn’t legally run MacOS, since the ROM contents were copyrighted, and doing so would require infringing on the ROM copyright. Apple obviously doesn’t care about this most of the time, but I imagine that if it becomes institutionalized at places that make real money, they might.

        But I don’t know if that’s still the case today. I’m vaguely recalling that there was some period where part of Apple’s EULA for MacOS prohibited running MacOS on non-Apple hardware, which would have been a different method of trying to tie it to the hardware.

        searches

        This is from 2019, and it sounds like at that point, Apple was leveraging the EULAs.

        https://discussions.apple.com/thread/250646417?sortBy=rank

        Posted on Sep 20, 2019 5:05 AM

        The widely held consensus is that it is only legal to run virtual copies of macOS on a genuine Apple made Apple Mac computer.

        There are numerous packages to do this but as above they all have to be done on a genuine Apple Mac.

        • VMware Fusion - this allows creating VMs that run as windows within a normal Mac environment. You can therefore have a virtual Mac running inside a Mac. This is useful to either run simultaneously different versions of macOS or to run a test environment inside your production environment. A lot of people are going to use this approach to run an older version of macOS which supports 32bit apps as macOS Catalina will not support old 32bit apps.
        • VMware ESXi aka vSphere - this is a different approach known as a ‘bare metal’ approach. With this you use a special VMware environment and then inside that create and run virtual machines. So on a Mac you could create one or more virtual Mac but these would run inside ESXi and not inside a Mac environment. It is more commonly used in enterprise situations and hence less applicable to Mac users.
        • Parallels Desktop - this works in the same way as VMware Fusion but is written by Parallels instead.
        • VirtualBox - this works in the same way as VMware Fusion and Parallels Desktop. Unlike those it is free of charge. Ostensible it is ‘owned’ by Oracle. It works but at least with regards to running virtual copies of macOS is still vastly inferior to VMware Fusion and Parallels Desktop. (You get what you pay for.)

        Last time I checked Apple’s terms you could do the following.

        • Run a virtualised copy of macOS on a genuine Apple made Mac for the purposes of doing software development
        • Run a virtualised copy of macOS on a genuine Apple made Mac for the purposes of testing
        • Run a virtualised copy of macOS on a genuine Apple made Mac for the purposes of being a server
        • Run a virtualised copy of macOS on a genuine Apple made Mac for personal non-commercial use

        No. Apple spells this out very clearly in the License Agreement for macOS. Must be installed on Apple branded hardware.

        They switched to ARM in 2020, so unless their legal position changed around ARM, I’d guess that they’re probably still relying on the EULA restrictions. That being said, EULAs have also been thrown out for various reasons, so…shrugs

        goes looking for the actual license text.

        Yeah, this is Tahoe’s EULA, the most-recent release:

        https://www.apple.com/legal/sla/docs/macOSTahoe.pdf

        Page 2 (of 895 pages):

        They allow only on Apple-branded hardware for individual purchases unless you buy from the Mac Store. For Mac Store purchases, they allow up to two virtual instances of MacOS to be executed on Apple-branded hardware that is also running the OS, and only under certain conditions (like for software development). And for volume purchase contracts, they say that the terms are whatever the purchaser negotiated. I’m assuming that there’s no chance that Apple is going to grant some “go use it as much as you want whenever you want to do CI tests or builds for open-source projects targeting MacOS” license.

        So for the general case, the EULA prohibits you from running MacOS wherever on non-Apple hardware.

    • morriscox@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      1 hour ago

      I sent the Darling link to a brother and suggested that he use it with Parallels… I couldn’t resist.