Good perspective. Unfortunately (1) is unavoidable when you're trying to automate GH itself (role assignments, tagging, etc.). But at this point, I would rather handle a lot of that manually than deal with GHA's awful debug loop.
FWIW, there's nektos/act[^1], which aims to duplicate GHA behavior locally, but I haven't tried it yet.
> Unfortunately (1) is unavoidable when you're trying to automate GH itself (role assignments, tagging, etc.)
Can't you just use the Github API for that? The script would be triggered by the YAML, but all logic is inside the script.
But `act` is cool, I've used it for local debugging. Thing is its output is impossibly verbose, and they don't aim to support everything an action does (which is fine if you stick to (2)).
Yeah, I've done quite a bit of Github scripting via octokit and it's pretty simple. Using GHA's built-in functionality might turn a five line script into a one-liner, but I think being able to run the script directly is well worth the tradeoff.
The main thing that you can't decouple from GHA is pushing and pulling intermediate artifacts, which for some build pipelines is going to be a pretty big chunk of the logic.
FWIW, there's nektos/act[^1], which aims to duplicate GHA behavior locally, but I haven't tried it yet.
[^1]: https://github.com/nektos/act