Description
Situation
Although GitHub Actions are still in public beta, it could be a helpful addition to this project in the future.
Ideas & Questions
Actually not any solution (yet), but some questions. 😉
Scope
I've opened this issue mere to collect ideas and discuss the pros and cons. It can lead to an implementation or that members decide to better reject this issue. Both would be fine for me. 😉
Currently, I don't see GH Actions as a replacement for the existing Web hooks for Travis or ReadTheDocs. They don't need to be replaced (although they potentially could). I see GH Actions more as an addition to simplify some specific workflows so that these workflows appear under one roof.
Additionally, if we need a specific workflow in the future, it can be usually added quite easily. Doing the same by creating a new Web hook and the respective infrastructure can be a bit more complicated.
Potential Use Cases
GH Actions are more than just "Travis CI". To name a few use cases:
- help with creating a release (see https://github.com/actions/create-release)
- help with creating additional assets when creating a release (for example, build automatically the documentation for each release and make it available as additional download in PDF or EPUB format; see https://github.com/actions/upload-release-asset)
- runs the black code formatter on the source code to maintain code style (see https://github.com/marketplace/actions/black-code-formatter)
- deploy automatically to Pypi after a successful build
- start automatic tasks every week/month, for example, to search for dead links, unsorted imports etc. and open new issues automatically. Like a weekly/monthly health report.
Of course, it is possible to create your own GH Actions: add a new repository to your organization and refer to it in the respective action config file.
Could that be a useful addition to our project?
Currently, I see the biggest benefits when creating new releases. When creating a new release, this usually involves some manual tasks which can be easily forgotten. With a GH Action this could be done automatically.