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True, but a build could fail arbitrarily fail for any unexpected reason. Pragmatism is important, I'd avoid adding an inconvenient step to my build/deploy process just to mitigate an infrequent edge case.


> a build could fail arbitrarily fail for any unexpected reason.

Good engineering is the attempt to prove that statement wrong.


Infrequent (I don't remeber that it happened to me during the hundred or thousand deploy I made with capistrano) and mostly harmless.

If the deploy fail for any reason, it's aborted, you just have to run it again.


What do you do if the package servers go down for a couple of days? "Oops! Guess I can't deploy. Oh well!"


Maybe my brain is wired differently, but having to tell a new hire "Oh yeah sometimes the build randomly fails and we just press retry until it works" would just feel kinda embarrasing to me.


That's not what I said. The point is one might as well say it never happens for how often it happens in practise. I have only had it happen once in recent memory, and even then it was because the hosted CI we use was experiencing issues.




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