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| author | Owen Jacobson <owen.jacobson@grimoire.ca> | 2015-12-09 20:40:42 -0500 |
|---|---|---|
| committer | Owen Jacobson <owen.jacobson@grimoire.ca> | 2015-12-09 20:40:42 -0500 |
| commit | f82d259e7bda843fb63ac1a0f6ff1d6bfb187099 (patch) | |
| tree | 502ebf27ea72cf8c6025b880bfdb35db00ce8b92 /.html/dev/whats-wrong-with-jenkins.html | |
| parent | 75a219a061b60bb32948b8a2b71c8ccf1dc19a62 (diff) | |
Remove HTML from the project. (We're no longer using Dokku.)
Diffstat (limited to '.html/dev/whats-wrong-with-jenkins.html')
| -rw-r--r-- | .html/dev/whats-wrong-with-jenkins.html | 172 |
1 files changed, 0 insertions, 172 deletions
diff --git a/.html/dev/whats-wrong-with-jenkins.html b/.html/dev/whats-wrong-with-jenkins.html deleted file mode 100644 index 1b9ab6e..0000000 --- a/.html/dev/whats-wrong-with-jenkins.html +++ /dev/null @@ -1,172 +0,0 @@ -<!DOCTYPE html> -<html> -<head> - <title> - The Codex » - Something's Rotten in the State of Jenkins - </title> - - <link - rel='stylesheet' - type='text/css' - href='http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Buenard:400,700&subset=latin,latin-ext'> - <link - rel="stylesheet" - type="text/css" - href="../media/css/reset.css"> - <link - rel="stylesheet" - type="text/css" - href="../media/css/grimoire.css"> -</head> -<body> - -<div id="shell"> - - <ol id="breadcrumbs"> - - <li class="crumb-0 not-last"> - - <a href="../">index</a> - - </li> - - <li class="crumb-1 not-last"> - - <a href="./">dev</a> - - </li> - - <li class="crumb-2 last"> - - whats-wrong-with-jenkins - - </li> - - </ol> - - - - <div id="article"> - <h1 id="somethings-rotten-in-the-state-of-jenkins">Something's Rotten in the State of Jenkins</h1> -<p>Automated, repeatable testing is a fairly widely-accepted cornerstone of -mature software development. Jenkins (and its predecessor, Hudson) has the -unique privilege of being both an early player in the niche and -free-as-in-beer. The blog space is littered with interesting articles about -continuous builds, automated testing, and continuous deployment, all of which -conclude on “how do we make Jenkins do it?”</p> -<p>This is unfortunate, because Jenkins has some serious problems, and I want it -to stop informing the discussion.</p> -<h2 id="theres-a-plugin-for-that">There's A Plugin For That</h2> -<p>Almost everything in the following can be addressed using one or more plugins -from Jenkins' extensive plugin repository. That's good - a build system you -can't extend is kind of screwed - but it also means that the Jenkins team -haven't felt a lot of pressure to address key problems in Jenkins proper.</p> -<p>(Plus, the plugin ecosystem is its own kind of screwed. More on that later.)</p> -<p>To be clear: being able to fix it with plugins does not make Jenkins itself -<em>good</em>. Plugins are a non-response to fundamental problems with Jenkins.</p> -<h2 id="no-granularity">No Granularity</h2> -<p>Jenkins builds are atomic: they either pass en suite, or fail en suite. Jenkins has no built-in support for recording that basic compilation succeeded, unit tests failed, but linting also succeeded.</p> -<p>You can fix this by running more builds, but then you run into problems with -...</p> -<h2 id="no-gating">No Gating</h2> -<p>... the inability to wait for multiple upstream jobs before continuing a -downstream job in a job chain. If your notional build pipeline is</p> -<ol> -<li>Compile, then</li> -<li>Lint and unit test, then</li> -<li>Publish binaries for testers/users</li> -</ol> -<p>then you need to combine the lint and unit test steps into a single build, or -tolerate occasionally publishing between zero and two copies of the same -original source tree.</p> -<h2 id="no-pipeline">No Pipeline</h2> -<p>The above are actually symptomatic of a more fundamental design problem in -Jenkins: there's no build pipeline. Jenkins is a task runner: triggers cause -tasks to run, which can cause further triggers. (Without plugins, Jenkins -can't even ensure that chains of jobs all build the same revisioins from -source control.)</p> -<p>I haven't met many projects whose build process was so simple you could treat -it as a single, pass-fail task, whose results are only interesting if the -whole thing succeeds.</p> -<h2 id="plugin-the-gap">Plugin the Gap</h2> -<p>To build a functional, non-trivial build process on top of Jenkins, you will -inevitably need plugins: plugins for source control, plugins for -notification, plugins for managing build steps, plugins for managing various -language runtimes, you name it.</p> -<p>The plugin ecosystem is run on an entirely volunteer basis, and anyone can -get a new plugin into the official plugin registry. This is good, in as much -as the barrier to entry <em>should</em> be low and people <em>should</em> be encouraged to -scratch itches, but it also means that the plugin registry is a swamp of -sporadically-maintained one-offs with inconsistent interfaces.</p> -<p>(Worse, even some <em>core</em> plugins have serious maintenance deficits: have a -look at how long -<a href="https://issues.jenkins-ci.org/browse/JENKINS-20767">JENKINS-20767</a> was open. -How many Jenkins users use Git?)</p> -<h2 id="the-plugin-api">The Plugin API</h2> -<p>The plugin API also, critically, locks Jenkins into some internal design -problems. The sheer number of plugins, and the sheer number of maintainers, -effectively prevents any major refactoring of Jenkins from making progress. -Breaking poorly-maintained plugins inevitably pisses off the users who were, -quite happily, using whatever they'd cooked up, but with the maintainership -of plugins so spread out and so sporadic, there's no easy way for the Jenkins -team to, for example, break up the <a href="https://github.com/jenkinsci/jenkins/blob/master/core/src/main/java/jenkins/model/Jenkins.java">4,000-line <code>Jenkins</code> class</a>.</p> -<h2 id="what-is-to-be-done">What Is To Be Done</h2> -<p>Jenkins is great and I'm glad it exists. Jenkins moved the state of the art -for build servers forward very effectively, and successfully out-competed -more carefully-designed offerings that were not, in fact, better: -<a href="http://continuum.apache.org">Continuum</a> is more or less abandoned, and when -was the last time you saw a -<a href="http://cruisecontrol.sourceforge.net">CruiseControl</a> (caution: SourceForge) -install?</p> -<p>It's interesting to compare the state of usability in, eg., Jenkins, to the -state of usability in some paid-product build systems -(<a href="https://www.atlassian.com/software/bamboo">Bamboo</a> and -<a href="https://www.jetbrains.com/teamcity/">TeamCity</a> for example) on the above -points, as well as looking at the growing number of hosted build systems -(<a href="https://travis-ci.org">TravisCI</a>, <a href="https://magnum-ci.com">MagnumCI</a>) for -ideas. A number of folks have also written insightful musings on what they -want to see in the next CI tool: Susan Potter's -<a href="https://github.com/mbbx6spp/carson">Carson</a> includes an interesting -motivating metaphor (if you're going to use butlers, why not use the whole -butler mileu?) and some good observations on how Jenkins lets us all down, -for example.</p> -<p>I think it's time to put Jenkins to bed and write its successor.</p> - </div> - - - -<div id="comments"> -<div id="disqus_thread"></div> -<script type="text/javascript"> - /* * * CONFIGURATION VARIABLES: EDIT BEFORE PASTING INTO YOUR WEBPAGE * * */ - var disqus_shortname = 'grimoire'; // required: replace example with your forum shortname - - /* * * DON'T EDIT BELOW THIS LINE * * */ - (function() { - var dsq = document.createElement('script'); dsq.type = 'text/javascript'; dsq.async = true; - dsq.src = 'http://' + disqus_shortname + '.disqus.com/embed.js'; - (document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0] || document.getElementsByTagName('body')[0]).appendChild(dsq); - })(); -</script> -<noscript>Please enable JavaScript to view the <a href="http://disqus.com/?ref_noscript">comments powered by Disqus.</a></noscript> -<a href="http://disqus.com" class="dsq-brlink">comments powered by <span class="logo-disqus">Disqus</span></a> -</div> - - - - <div id="footer"> - <p> - - The Codex — - - Powered by <a href="http://markdoc.org/">Markdoc</a>. - -<a href="https://bitbucket.org/ojacobson/grimoire.ca/src/master/wiki/dev/whats-wrong-with-jenkins.md">See this page on Bitbucket</a> (<a href="https://bitbucket.org/ojacobson/grimoire.ca/history-node/master/wiki/dev/whats-wrong-with-jenkins.md">history</a>). - - </p> - </div> - -</div> -</body> -</html>
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