Hello, welcome to “the greyest DevOps update”, brought to you by the clever “the year’s greyest day” marketing gimmick invented by a Finnish booze company. I admit I can’t recall the last time I saw the sun. (Just how I like it.)
The last week has mostly been a continuation of the previous. Issues with Darwin runners and Stackage migrations. Most of the issues with Darwin runners are fixed, but there’s still an oddity with one performance test now performing badly on one OS version and better-than-expected on another. I also just discovered that 4 of 7 Darwin runner processes had gone offline and I have no idea why. (System monitoring and alerting, when?) At least I was able to get them all started again.
I also just reviewed a change to Cabal’s release process, moving from GitLab CI/CD to GitHub workflows. I’ve been keeping Cabal’s GitLab pipeline working, but don’t feel strongly either way about where it runs. I’m broadly in favor of providing a cohesive Haskell Experience™. This change does decouple GHC and Cabal to some extent, which gives me pause. But I recognize that I am strongly influenced by professional experience where I actually do want my entire toolchain to be built in exactly the same isolated clean room, thank you very much, because I’ll eventually need that anyway in order to track down some ridiculous bug in whatever commerial product I am working on. But I also do appreciate loose coupling between components, and I don’t think that is a contradiction. From that perspective it might even be better if Cabal’s release process is less reliant on GHC developer practices.
In the end, I think the most important principle is that neither I nor you should make that decision, but the people who are entrusted to do the work should be given the tools and support they need. So my opinion is just that: an opinion. Delegation of authority is key to an efficient system.
Last week, we also had our regular Haskell CI call. I have not published the notes for that yet, but you can see previous notes (and an open invitation) at GitHub - haskellfoundation/haskell-ci-group: Public notes and artifacts from the Haskell CI Group meetings.
That’s all for today!