[initialization-actions] The repository has manually-generated, re-used code which gets out of sync

[cjac]

The init actions repo has had some problems accepting changes from multiple contributors at once because much of its codebase is duplicated in each action.

I propose that we re-factor the common code into templates and build the actions from templates instead.

Some options are:

Perl's Template::Toolkit Template::Toolkit re-written in Python https://github.com/lmr/Template-Toolkit-Python m4 macros as used by GNU automake / autoconf

[cjac]

This is the same problem which prompted the now-defunct PR #1030

Sharing code would help us to accept more patches in parallel. The lack of a way to share code is blocking merge of #1259