June 2, 2024
It’s always YAML and there’s seemingly no end in sight when it comes to relying on it to configure anything and everything. Don’t get me wrong though, I find it way more readable than JSON and way more accessible than TOML in terms of support within programming languages and when working on the command line. At a point it all starts to fall apart and that point usually arrives when the number of lines and/or files increases, which tends to happen when more complicated configurations are needed.
Like it or not, tools like Dagger and Earthly still aren’t prevalent enough1 where the industry as a whole could move away from YAML2, thus whether it’s Azure DevOps, GitLab or GitHub, the lingua franca continues to be YAML.
I’ve tried them on a proof-of-concept level and both have their upsides and downsides, but I ultimately decided against them due to it not being immediately apparent to me how I could easily template either tools’ resulting files. ↩
Jenkins sure did try to make Jenkinsfiles a thing prior to the proliferation of other CI/CD platforms, but there doesn’t seem to be a lot of love for that format. ↩