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About two weeks ago I created, and then published, an Orb called hutson/semantic-delivery. It exports a single job called delivery.

Here’s a minimal usage example:

version: 2.1

orbs:
  semantic-delivery: hutson/semantic-delivery@1.0.2

workflows:
  default:
    jobs:
      - semantic-delivery/delivery:
          context: github-interaction

Under jobs you can see that I invoke the delivery job contained in the hutson/semantic-delivery Orb. Based on my experience, I feel my example demonstrates how the approach of one-job per Orb may not be a good choice.

Circle CI Orbs have no default export for an Orb. So I will always end up with the extra /delivery in the job name, even though it’s the only job contained in the Orb.

What I feel might be a better approach for my Orbs is to bundle common tasks for a given workflow, or language, into a single Orb.

Circle CI does this well with their circleci/node Orb.

So I’ve begun exploring this path by renaming my hutson/semantic-delivery Orb to hutson/library-release-workflows.

My intention is to export jobs, commands, and executors, that automate a library’s delivery, deploy, and release, workflows on Circle CI.

My Orb still has a deliver job which tags a library based on the commit conventions used in the library’s repository.

My next task is to explore publishing the tagged library to a public package registry, such as Npm and PyPI. So now I have new questions, such as:

  • Should I have a single deploy job that can be used by any language, and do the language detection (to know what publication method to use) based on the contents of the repository?
  • Or do I use a parameterized job that allows the user to tell me which package registry to use?
  • Or do I just create a python-deploy job, and a npm-deploy job, etc?

Also:

  • Should I expect library maintainers to use hutson/library-release-workflows directly, or should it’s functionality be exposed through a language-specific Orb, such as a Node or Python Orb like circleci/node?
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