A bit offtopic: I wonder if we could create custom orbs to make the CI config in the main repo more modular...

https://circleci.com/blog/building-private-orbs/

Definitely! If there are many repeated tasks there that could also be reused by other repos in the organization, it would be beneficial to split them in orbs.

There is some common stuff. For example the gitter notification command may be a good candidate for an orb (while at it, we could also make it work on Windows). The t_ems_ext is used by external tests and their definitions are pretty repetitive too. And there are some common steps/templates. Also generally splitting the whole file into smaller bits by grouping similar jobs (build/test jobs, bytecode compare, external tests, etc.) would be great if possible.

We have a whole issue about that (ethereum/solidity#11846) but there are limits to what we can within a single file do and so far I did not consider creating orbs.

Nice! Thanks, I can take a look on that :)
I can start with the gitter notification then, since there is already an issue for the failing solc-bin nightly builds.

Maybe shellcheck does need the ./ bit after all? I see in the CI output that it did not skip files inside node_modules:

./node_modules/tape/example/static/build.sh
./node_modules/foreground-child/changelog.sh
No ShellCheck Errors Found

Unless it just prints them without checking?

By the way, the orb is nice. I see that it for example automatically adds shellcheck.log as an artifact (if non-empty). That's handy.

oh no! Indeed it is not skipping those directories. There is an example of the config in the official repo: https://github.com/CircleCI-Public/shellcheck-orb/blob/73e2427de6b0a5d0c27527b608ee62880e3dbfb0/.circleci/config.yml#L22 and the ./ is used. I will put it back.

Hum...still it shows. So yeah, it seems that it parses anyway but probably don't check as you mentioned. So let's go without it :)

Can you try it out locally on a file where you intentionally make a mistake to make sure?

Yes. It seems that it indeed considers the "ignored" folders when they terminate with / (e.g. node_modules/). If I remove the forward slash in the end, it works.

With node_modules/ or ./node_modules/:

./scripts/wrong.sh
./node_modules/foreground-child/changelog.sh
./node_modules/tape/example/static/build.sh
ShellCheck Errors Found

In ./scripts/wrong.sh line 5:
if [ $1 -eq "1"]; then
^-- SC1009: The mentioned syntax error was in this if expression.
   ^-- SC1073: Couldn't parse this test expression. Fix to allow more checks.
                ^-- SC1020: You need a space before the ].
                ^-- SC1072: Missing space before ]. Fix any mentioned problems and try again.

Without the forward slash in the end ./node_modules:

./scripts/wrong.sh
ShellCheck Errors Found

In ./scripts/wrong.sh line 5:
if [ $1 -eq "1"]; then
^-- SC1009: The mentioned syntax error was in this if expression.
   ^-- SC1073: Couldn't parse this test expression. Fix to allow more checks.
                ^-- SC1020: You need a space before the ].
                ^-- SC1072: Missing space before ]. Fix any mentioned problems and try again

In conclusion, we need the current directory prefix, and we should not add the end forward slash.

ok. Let's revert to the way it was originally.

Too bad that it's that picky. For a shell these would be perfectly fine and equivalent.

Yes. I reverted it already. I opened an issue in the orb repo anyway, asking about this behavior.