Blacklisting of PIM from the CI system

[Ben Cooksley]

On Sun, Dec 1, 2019 at 9:58 AM Ingo Klöcker <kloecker at kde.org> wrote:
>
> [Intentionally top posting; CCing the CWG, but excluding kde-core-devel and
> kde-devel.]
>
> Hi Ben,

Hi Ingo,

>
> I can understand that you are extremely annoyed by the nths disturbance of the
> CI system by some PIM projects, but quite frankly I find your reaction
> questionable. You seem to imply that the KDE PIM developers are sabotaging the

My reaction is based on several years of observed behaviour.

A substantial proportion of the issues which are encountered with the
CI system tend to be due to PIM.

This includes jobs getting stuck due to tests not behaving properly,
jobs having to be retried because new code was added to libraries and
immediately put into use without delay (which because the CI system
cannot sequence builds based on dependencies guarantees failure), and
total failures to build in general which tend to require followup for
them to be fixed (because the emails from the CI system are ignored)

> CI system on purpose. Maybe they are careless and need to be disciplined, but
> I'm not sure that publicly (by that I mean on mailing lists other than kde-
> pim; of course, kde-pim is also public) accusing them of intentional bad
> behavior ("over 2 days ago, there is no excuse for this series of build
> failures") was called for. In my opinion, your blacklisting of PIM and

Given that projects are supposed to communicate via their mailing
lists, and the CI system informs said mailing list that the build
failed, with no evidence of attempts being made to fix the build, how
else would you interpret this?

> threatening of continued exclusion from CI is bordering at abuse of power. You
> are acting as judge, jury, and executioner in one person which I find
> disturbing.

There is no abuse of power here.
This is the simple act of me declaring this continued state of affairs
as unsustainable and unmaintainable and proposing two possible ways
out of it.

I'll note that you've not proposed any action plan here to ensure the
problem does not occur again once it is fixed.

>
> Regards,
> Ingo
>

Cheers,
Ben

>
> On Samstag, 30. November 2019 19:14:38 CET Ben Cooksley wrote:
> > Hi all,
> >
> > This morning I went to look into provisioning a new Windows Builder
> > node for the CI system, but hit a roadblock created by PIM currently
> > failing to build from source.
> >
> > As some background to this, we use Craft to provide various
> > dependencies of our projects that aren't provided by Windows itself
> > (such as Qt, gettext, poppler and so forth). From time to time this is
> > updated to provide newer versions of software, but unless it is
> > necessary for a project, the CI nodes themselves often aren't updated.
> >
> > We use the same approach for both Linux and FreeBSD, except those
> > dependencies are provided by the distribution for those two.
> >
> > This means that when it comes time to provision a new node, all of the
> > nodes need to be updated. As these changes essentially always break
> > compatibility in some form or another this makes it necessary for us
> > to rebuild all the KDE software as well.
> >
> > It is therefore not possible to proceed with any of the above while
> > something is failing to build.
> >
> > Which is where the problem with PIM comes in - because it currently
> > has many repositories failing to build from source on all platforms
> > those builds are enabled for (including Linux and FreeBSD).
> >
> > Given that the PIM project mailing list is emailed by the CI system,
> > and that the changes in one case were pushed over 2 days ago, there is
> > no excuse for this series of build failures.
> >
> > In addition to all of the above, this round of updates was to lay the
> > ground work for adding additional dependencies which are necessary for
> > the builds of Digikam and SubtitleComposer to commence on the CI
> > system for Windows. These failures by PIM have therefore indirectly
> > harmed other KDE projects.
> >
> > As this is not the first time that PIM has caused issues in this
> > manner, I would therefore like to proceed with blacklisting PIM from
> > the CI system. This would include prohibiting other projects from
> > depending on any part of PIM, so those projects that have a required
> > dependency on PIM would also have their builds removed by this.
> >
> > Whilst I would prefer another solution to this, given that it is a
> > recurring issue that makes maintenance of the CI system substantially
> > harder, I see the removal of PIM from the equation as the only
> > reasonable path forward.
> >
> > Should the PIM developers wish to avoid this consequence for their
> > actions, they will need to provide an action plan as to how this will
> > be avoided in the future.
> >
> > Fixing the current set of failures will not prevent this blacklisting
> > action from being carried out - as a recurring issue it needs a
> > permanent solution.
> >
> > Regards,
> > Ben Cooksley
> > KDE Sysadmin
>