Agreed, it's much better than Travis. But the GP is right, it's more "hack blocks together", where each action does its own thing and acts on the files independently, and there isn't much control over the whole process. Heck, they don't even fully support the entire YAML spec (I'd give citations on that but I'm writing from my phone, and don't have the time to pull it up).

I haven't used GitLab for a while because most of the projects I'm working on are on GitHub, so I can't comment on GitLab CI.

It's much better than Travis in every way except one: GitHub Actions pull request checks are against the PR branch, while Travis pull request checks are against a merged tree.

The most common case where this matters is if someone pushes a failing commit to master, and then all PRs based on that commit will also fail, and then a fix is pushed to master. With Travis, you just need to re-run checks, but with GitHub actions, all those PRs need to be rebased on the new master.

> GitHub Actions pull request checks are against the PR branch, while Travis pull request checks are against a merged tree

Actually, actions/checkout will check out the merged tree by default.

Indeed, the documentation reflects this. So why isn't it happening on my repo? Weird...

Yeah, that's interesting. Being able to run the runner on my own instance on Google cloud is so easy to troubleshoot. I've not played with actions but when I need to shell into my runner and check something, having root and owning the machine makes that really fast.