Re:A one-line change decreased our build times by 99%
by DougBTX on Monday October 26, 2020 @07:24AM
(#24894946)
It is interesting that we trust our tools so little. A git hash is a pretty robust way to know whether the code in the repo is what it is supposed to be, so a "git fetch" rather than a fresh "git clone" should be safe, but we can't trust the build steps to not trash the build-runner so the entire thing needs to be thrown away.
Edit: for context, I wrote this comment while waiting for `npm ci` to run. Its first step is to delete the node_modules folder, as otherwise it can't be trusted to update correctly.
Re:A one-line change decreased our build times by 99%
by ForHackernews on Monday October 26, 2020 @07:33AM
(#24894992)
> we can't trust the build steps to not trash the build-runner so the entire thing needs to be thrown away.
I think it's partly this, and partly that everything is shared infrastructure now. I don't want to pay to keep a machine up 24/7 just to use it to run a build for 10 minutes half a dozen times per day.
So instead I lease time on shared hardware with ephemeral "containers" or "virtual machines" or whatever.
It's an easy (if inefficient) way to always get the latest changes and if you have disposable build-runners then it all gets thrown away at the end of the pipeline.