more GitHub Actions: rjbs/dzil-actions

I’ll be quick, this is just an update to my last post!

I had complained that I’d had to leave the matrixing of perl versions in my per-repo workflow, so the structure of any given repository’s workflow was something like this:

jobs:
  build-tarball:
    steps:
    - uses: rjbs/dzil-build@v0
  multiperl-test:
    strategy:
      matrix:
        perl-version: $
    container:
      image: perldocker/perl-tester:$
    steps:
    - name: Test distribution
      uses: rjbs/test-perl-dist@v0

I’ve eliminated a lot of content from the above, to keep it short. My complaint was that I wanted to put the matrix stuff out in some abstracted action, but I couldn’t. Actions can’t matrix, jobs can matrix. (It’s something like this. The documentation answers a lot of questions, but it’s not laid out in a way that I find easy to dig through or refer back to.)

While looking at things in the perl-actions/perl-versions repo, I came to realize that there’s a way around this. Instead of using an action, you use a reusable workflow. I started to put one together as rjbs/dzil-test but hit some snags. I no longer remember the details, but it felt like “you can’t call things in such-and-such away outside one repository”. I’m no longer sure that’s what it really was, though. The errors you get are often very bare statements of fact without much context or hinting at what you might have meant. That, along with the docs, have made this project involve a lot more thinking and experimenting than I feel should have been necessary. But that’s life as a programmer, right?

What I ended up doing was creating yet another repository, rjbs/dzil-actions, which contains a bunch of the actions I’d been using, plus two workflows. One workflow tests a tarball against a bunch of perls. The other workflow builds a tarball from a Dist::Zilla-based repository and then calls the first one. It feels pretty reasonable. It’s just the path that got me here that feels a bit unreasonable.

At this point, I think the complete workflow file I’m installing is now about the length I want. Behold, the whole thing:

name: "dzil matrix"
on:
  workflow_dispatch: ~
  push:
    branches: "*"
    tags-ignore: "*"
  pull_request: ~

jobs:
  build-and-test:
    name: dzil-matrix
    uses: rjbs/dzil-actions/.github/workflows/dzil-matrix.yaml@v0

Written on June 9, 2024