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Fold deploy.sh into a GitHub Action? #287

Open tabatkins opened 11 months ago

tabatkins commented 11 months ago

In the WHATWG chatroom, @jgraham suggested folding the deploy.sh script into the GitHub Action for triggering deploys, so contributors don't have to worry about running make deploy.

I don't have enough insight into what the deploy script does to know if it's useful to run locally or if it does things that are awkward to express in GH Actions.

domenic commented 11 months ago

I prefer being able to run it locally and check and debug the output. I don't see any advantages of this.

Contributors generally don't need to know about make deploy, so I'm not sure why that is brought up.

jgraham commented 11 months ago

Contributors generally do need to know about it because currently the only way to figure out how to build WHATWG specs is to either a) notice there's a Makefile and read it, or b) read https://github.com/whatwg/meta/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING.md where make deploy is (unintentionally) the most prominent thing under "Building".

In any case the deploy target seems to be a two line shell script that first downloads the latest version of another shell script and then runs it. It seems like it would be totally possible for the few people who want to use this just to have that two line script somewhere on their path, and in CI you can just put the two lines directly in the GH actions workflow.

But of course that only makes sense if you first remove the dependency on make for the common use case of local builds, and then also want to stop using it entirely. To me that would be an improvement, because as a simple frontend the way it's used for WHATWG specs I consider make to offer negative value. But as long as one can make a build only using the standard toolchain (i.e. bikeshed spec) I care much less about how you organise the code for advanced use cases.