msvc-wine VS act

Okay, I am trying it, but it does not exactly work out of the box. Do you remember how you got a hand on the MSVC libraries? I use https://github.com/mstorsjo/msvc-wine to download the MSVC toolchain using python, and then I simply wget this file https://raw.githubusercontent.com/llvm/llvm-project/main/llvm/cmake/platforms/WinMsvc.cmake, and call CMake like in the example the file has as a comment in the first few lines. I installed clang-tools-15 and lld-15 using apt. Does this sound somehow correct? I set all the paths correctly and I get a CMake Error "include could not find requested file: [...] //ClangClCMakeCompileRules.cmake", the error occurs while CMake is testing the C compiler if it works.

That's a nice lead! - I'll try looking into that more. If you have or remember some more details - please share! Thanks!

(One of my use cases is https://github.com/mstorsjo/msvc-wine - and invocation of `cl.exe` or `link.exe` taking 250ms at each is not going to be great (then again `cl.exe` can be made to input several .cpp/.c files, but it becomes more awkward to express that at the build level).

you can run the C++ compiler via wine: https://github.com/mstorsjo/msvc-wine

I guess I should try installing MSVC again one of these days. Maybe it's finally possible to setup a "real" Windows cross compilation build environment without msvc-wine.

To speed up your development cycle, install and use the act tool to test-run your action directly in your development environment. This tool lets you invoke a GitHub workflow right on your local machine and will save you the round-trips of pushing each change to GitHub to see if it works.

When it comes to the alternatives to tmate, there is another great debugging tool that you could check out. It is called act and it allows you to run GitHub Actions code on your local machine making debugging even easier. It has its own limitations and some learning curve but overall it is another tool you should use if you can’t fix the CI bugs by connecting directly into the running action with the tmate.

Link: https://github.com/nektos/act

Could you upload your build of GitHub's runner image to Docker Hub?

This would be quite useful for users of other GitHub Actions clones like act [0].

[0]: https://github.com/nektos/act

> These kinds of commit messages are typically an indicator of a broken process where somebody needs to commit to see something happen, like a deployment or build process, and aren't able to assert that stuff works locally.

This is one of my biggest pet peeves with services like github actions. Something running locally like "act" [1] isn't sufficient because it doesn't have everything github has and is extra friction anyway to get everyone to use it for testing.

[1] https://github.com/nektos/act

View on GitHub

If you use Github actions, act is incredibly useful. It can be used to test your GH actions, but also serves as an interface for running tasks locally.

That's something that often is difficult or basically impossible. Except for maybe GitHub actions through Act (https://github.com/nektos/act). I'd still lean to something in the yaml sphere if it eventually would be used in deployment pipelines and such. For example a solution incorporating ansible.

It also seems to me that the argument you make is mostly focused on the building step? Earthly certainly seems focused on that aspect.

I feel I'm being trolled, but I'll bite and accept the resulting downvotes

I don't think treating every mention of act as an opportunity for airing of personal grievances is helpful in a discussion when there's already ample reports of people's concrete issues with it, had one looked at the 800 issues in its repo https://github.com/nektos/act/issues?q=is%3Aissue or the 239 from gitea's for https://gitea.com/gitea/act_runner/issues or whatever is going on with Forgejo's fork https://code.forgejo.org/forgejo/act .

But, as for me specifically, there are two and a half answers: I wanted to run VSCodium's build locally, which act for sure puked about. Then, while trying to troubleshoot that, I thought I'd try something simpler and have it run the lint job from act's own repo <https://github.com/nektos/act/blob/1252e551b8672b1e16dc8835d...> to rule out "you're holding it wrong" type junk. It died with

  [checks/lint]     Failure - Main actions/setup-go@v3

https://twitter.com/mitsuhiko/status/1720410479141487099 :

> GitHub Actions currently charges $0.16 per minute* for the macOS M1 Runners. That comes out to $84,096 for 1 machine year*

GitHub Runner is written in Go; it fetches tasks from GitHub Actions and posts the results back to the Pull Request that spawned the build.

nektos/act is how Gitea Actions builds GitHub Actions workflow YAML build definition documents. https://github.com/nektos/act

https://twitter.com/MatthewCroughan/status/17200423527675700... :

> This is the macOS Ventura installer running in 30 VMs, in 30 #nix derivations at once. It gets the installer from Apple, automates the installation using Tesseract OCR and TCL Expect scripts. This is to test the repeatability. A single function call `makeDarwinImage`.

With a Multi-Stage Dockerfile/Containerfild, you can have a dev environment like xcode or gcc+make in the first stage that builds the package, and then the second stage the package is installed and tested, and then the package is signed and published to a package repo / app store / OCI container image repository.

SLSA now specifies builders for signing things correctly in CI builds with keys in RAM on the build workers.

"Build your own SLSA 3+ provenance builder on GitHub Actions" https://slsa.dev/blog/2023/08/bring-your-own-builder-github