You can't put a breakpoint in YAML. You can't evaluate variables in YAML. You can't print debugging info from YAML. You can't rerun YAML from some point.
YAML is great for the happy-flow where everything works. It's absolutely terrible for any other flow.
FWIW there's no reason why you shouldn't be able to put a breakpoint in pipeline YAML. I'm not aware of anyone implementing such a thing, but a DAP adapter that VSCode could attach to remotely should be pretty straightforward.
MSBuild, for example, is all XML, but it has debugging support in Visual Studio complete with breakpoints and expression evaluation.
> You can't put a breakpoint in YAML. You can't evaluate variables in YAML. You can't print debugging info from YAML. You can't rerun YAML from some point
It's a DSL. There is no execution, only configuration. The only thing that's executed are the custom scripts you create yourself, and any intro tutorial on the subject will eventually teach you that if you want to run anything beyond a single straight-forward command then you should move those instructions to a shell script to make them testable and reproducible.
Things are so simple and straight forward that you need to go way out of your way to create your own problems.
I wonder how many people in this discussion are blaming the tools when they even bothered to learn the very basics.
Your attitude of "how is everyone so stupid" does not help the discussion.
> It's a DSL. There is no execution, only configuration.
Jenkins pipelines are also DSL. I still can print out debugging information from them. "It's a DSL" is not an excuse for being a special case of shitty DSL.
> any intro tutorial on the subject will eventually teach you
Do these tutorials have a chapter on what to do when you join a company with 500 engineers and a ton of YAMLs that are not written in that way?
> you should move those instructions to a shell script to make them testable
Yeah, no. How am I supposed to test my script that is supposed to run on Github-supplied runner with a ton of injected secrets and Github-supplied JSON of 10,000 lines, when I don’t have the runner, the secrets, or the JSON?
The YAML is fed into an agent which reads it to decide what to execute. Any time you change the control flow of a system by changing data, you are doing a form of programming.
YAML is great for the happy-flow where everything works. It's absolutely terrible for any other flow.