[ANNOUNCEMENT] - Differential ShellCheck future architecture changes :building_construction:

[jamacku]

Type of issue

Announcement

Description

In the future, we would like to implement other actions based on a similar philosophy as Differential ShellCheck.

• @redhat-plumbers-in-action/differential-cppcheck
• @lzaoral/cswrap-action

Describe the solution you'd like

At the moment we are thinking about extracting some parts from the source code of Differential ShellCheck and making them standalone GitHub Actions. That would allow us to reduce the complexity of the code and lower the maintenance cost.

Good candidates for extractions are parts that compare log files (cswrap) and upload SARIF to GitHub. When extracted architecture could look something like this:

graph TD
    A[Differential ShellCheck action] -->|before.log and after.log| B[csgrep action]
    B -->|output.sarif| C[upload SARIF action]

Note: The end user will not notice this change once it is implemented in redhat-plumbers-in-action/differential-shellcheck@v4

[lzaoral]

I think we could combine the last two steps into a single action. We already do that in differential-shellcheck.

[jamacku]

Hmm, I was thinking that cswrap action could generate more output types, not only SARIF. But in general it's possible to merge them together.

[lzaoral]

I didn't think of that usecase, that definitely sounds useful. I'd still lean to having a single action (maybe combining these two?) to process the results, though, as that seems more user friendly to me.