Ill prepare a post for the mailing list tomorrow showing off some of our ideas for a visual editor - we want to make it just as easy to use Pipeline jobs as it is to use FreeStyle today. I agree, things are not where they are at but we are working hard on it. Ill ask someone to share some ideas that we have around making Pipeline easier to author and understand when in a Jenkinsfile too.
On Friday, May 27, 2016 at 5:45:10 PM UTC+10, Tom Fennelly wrote: > > On Friday, May 27, 2016 at 7:59:41 AM UTC+1, Craig Rodrigues wrote: >> >> Hi, >> >> The new Jenkins UI looks nice, and will be a big improvement over the >> existing UI. >> >> The original selling point of Jenkins was that even with the simplistic >> forms-based UI, >> someone could fill out a relatively simple form, and have a continuous >> integration pipeline. >> I have met people who were general devops and scripting people, and could >> use Jenkins quite nicely. >> >> While I understand the motivation for Pipeline (previously known as >> Workflow), I can't say I'm very happy with the results. >> >> Here are some of the pain points I've encountered with Pipeline scripts: >> >> - Other than the most trivial of scripts, you need to be a >> knowledgable Groovy programmer. For example, to make a global variable, >> you need to use a @Field. (What?!) Most scripting and devops people >> that >> I know don't really know Groovy. >> - Documentation for Pipeline scripts isn't that great (although it >> has definitely been improving). In all honesty, I cannot point a junior >> scripting person to write a good Pipeline script for developing a build >> Pipeline. >> - The durable task plugin which invokes shell commands on Unix, and >> batch jobs on Windows goes through an elaborate method for invoking shell >> commands. It is very, very difficult to grab the exit status of >> commands, >> stderr, stdout, etc. For a while, these wrappers would do things like >> not >> detect when a command had terminated, etc. (Looks like this has been >> fixed >> now) >> - It is very hard to figure out how to cancel a running Pipeline >> job. The UI link to "Click here to cancel" a Pipeline job is hidden in >> the >> build output, and often doesn't work. >> >> I understand that Jenkins is going through a big transition period. >> Hopefully at the end of the road, things will be much better. >> However, at this point in time, I would say that in many ways, the >> current direction is *worse* than the old way of doing things with the >> old Jenkins UI. >> The old way has problems, but it was easy to figure out, and didn't have >> a lot of these intermediate layers that try to abstract things out, >> but make things harder to figure out what is going on. >> >> -- >> Craig >> > > Hi Craig. > > I hear what you are saying. I think your comments are fair and are things > that we need to address. > > I think you'll agree that the lower level details relating to how specific > plugins work (durable task etc) is a "general" Jenkins/pipeline problem > that needs to be addressed i.e. is not really specific to the Blue Ocean > (BO) project. > > As for the usability issues wrt actually "using" Jenkins pipeline > (creating flow/execution scripts etc), they are most definitely issues that > are very relevant to the BO project. Some prototyping work > <https://github.com/jenkinsci/pipeline-editor-plugin> was done in this > area a while back (and maybe there are other efforts too) and it seems > natural that the plan would be to pick one of these up again in some form > and build it into BO, making pipeline "author" more of a visual (drag & > drop .. fill out a form) kind of process. > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Jenkins Users" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to jenkinsci-users+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/jenkinsci-users/e8e9ef9f-5636-4608-a27c-66af41aa0d65%40googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
