I think people just hate CI set up by other people. I used TeamCity in a job a few years back and I absolutely hated it, however I imagine a lot of my hatred was the way it was set up.

CI is just the thing no one wants to deal with, yet everyone wants to just work. And like any code or process, you need engineering to make it good. And like any project, you can't just blame bad tools for crappy results.

I think people just hate enterprise CI/CD. Setting up a pipeline for your own project isn't this hard and provides immediate value. But then you start getting additional requirements like "no touching your CI/CD code", "no using plugins except A, B or C" and "deployment must be integrated with Rally/Microfocus/another corporate change management system". Suddenly your pipelines become weird and brittle and feel like busywork.

It seems to inspire strong feelings. I set it up at a previous company and at some point after I left they replaced it with Jenkins. However, nobody could explain to me why or what problems they thought they were solving. The feedback was the sort of thing you're saying now: a dislike that can't be articulated.

Whereas, I could articulate why I didn't like Jenkins just fine :)

I would feel that way but I've had the misfortune to work with a wide open ci system where any developer could make thanges and one guy did. The locked down system prevents me form some changes I want but in return my builds don't suddenly start failing because some ci option was turned on for everyone.

I totally prefer to have the ci break from time to time and be able to fix it than having the risk of it being broken and having no way of fixing it

The people who admin our CI system do a good job so it doesn't break, (well it does all the time, but onnetwork type errors not configuration - that is IT's fault not their fault.)

The thing I want to change are things that I do in the build system so that it is checked in and previous versions when we need to build them (we are embedded where field failure is expensive so there are typically branches for the current release, next release, and head). This also means anything that can fail on CI can fail on my local system (unless it depends on something like the number of cores on the machine running the build).

While the details can be slightly different, how we have CI is how it should be. most developers should have better things to do than worry about how to configure CI.

In our CI we do a lot of clever stuff like posting comments to github PRs, sending messages on slack, etc. Even though those are useful things it makes the CI a bit harder to make changes to and test. Making it do more things also makes it a bit of a blackbox.

TeamCity's "config as code" feels a bit like an afterthought to me. (It's very Windows-style, where PowerShell got bolted on, and you're still fighting a bit of an upstream current getting clickops users out of old habits. I've also only experienced it at .NET-stack jobs, though, so I might be a bit biased :-)

(I don't recall _loving_ it, though I don't have as many bad memories of it as I do for VSTS/TFS, GitLab, GH Actions, Jenkins Groovyfiles, ...)

The quotes around "config as code" are necessary unfortunately, because TeamCity only allows minimal config changes. The UI will always show the configuration from the main branch and if you remove or add steps it might not work.

We needed two more or less completely different configurations for old a new versions of the same software (think hotfix for past releases), but TeamCity can't handle this scenario at all. So now we have duplicated the configuration and some hacky version checks that cancel incompatible builds.

Maybe their new Pipeline stuff fixes some of these short comings.

Try doing a clean git clone in TeamCity. Nope, not even with the plugins that claim “clean clone” capability. You should be confident that CI can build/run/test an app with a clean starting point. If the CI forces a cached state on an agent that you can’t clear… TeamCity just does it wrong.

You just check the "delete files in checkout directory" box in the run screen. Are you thinking of something different? I've never had trouble doing a clean clone.

It’s been a while since I used it but I do remember that it doesn’t do a clean checkout and you can’t force it to. It leaves artifacts on the agent that can interfere with subsequent builds. I assume they do it for speed but it can affect reliability of builds

I don't know when you used it, but I've used it for years and it's always had that feature in every version I've used.

git clean refuses to work ?

> You can configure it with a GUI, or in XML, or using a type safe Kotlin DSL.

This is making me realize I want a CI with as few features as possible. If I'm going to spend months of my life debugging this thing I want as few corners to check as I can manage.

I've never had to spend time debugging TeamCity setups. It's very transparent and easy to understand (to me, at least).

I tend to stick with the GUI because if you're doing JVM style work the complexity and tasks is all in the build you can run locally, the CI system is more about task scheduling so it's not that hard to configure. But being able to migrate from GUI to code when the setup becomes complex enough to justify it is a very nice thing.