> When it gets realistic, with conditions, variable substitutions, etc.,
What exactly do you find hard in writing your own scripts with a scripting language? Surely you are not a software developer who feels conditionals and variable substitutions are hard.
> it ends up being 20 steps in a language that isn't shell but is calling shell over and over again, and can't be run outside of CI.
Why are you writing your CICD scripts in a way that you cannot run them outside of a CICD pipeline? I mean, you're writing them yourself, aren't you? Why are you failing to meet your own requirements?
If you have a requirement to run your own scripts outside of a pipeline, how come you're not writing them like that? It's CICD 101 that those scripts should be runnable outside of the pipeline. From your description, you're failing to even follow the most basic recommendations and best practices. Why?
This is not about YAML in some general or abstract sense, it is about a YAML-based domain-specific language. If you think this is just about YAML, you are hyper-focused on the wrong detail.
In order to use this domain-specific language properly, you first must learn it, and learning YAML is but a small part of that. Moreover, it is not immediately obvious that, once you know it, you actually want to avoid it. But you can't avoid it entirely, because it is the core language of the CI/CD platform. And you can't know how to avoid it effectively until you have spent some time just using it directly. Simplicity comes from tearing away what is unnecessary, but to discern necessary from unnecessary requires judgment gained by experience. There is no world in which this knowledge transfers immediately, frictionlessly, and losslessly.
Furthermore, there is a lot that GitHub (replace with platform of choice) could have done to make this better. They largely have no incentive to do so, because platform lock-in isn't a bad thing to the platform owner, and it's a nontrivial amount of work on their part, just as it is a nontrivial amount of work on your part to learn and use their platform in a way that doesn't lock you into it.
What exactly do you find hard in writing your own scripts with a scripting language? Surely you are not a software developer who feels conditionals and variable substitutions are hard.
> it ends up being 20 steps in a language that isn't shell but is calling shell over and over again, and can't be run outside of CI.
Why are you writing your CICD scripts in a way that you cannot run them outside of a CICD pipeline? I mean, you're writing them yourself, aren't you? Why are you failing to meet your own requirements?
If you have a requirement to run your own scripts outside of a pipeline, how come you're not writing them like that? It's CICD 101 that those scripts should be runnable outside of the pipeline. From your description, you're failing to even follow the most basic recommendations and best practices. Why?
That doesn't sound like a YAML problem, does it?