CI system maintainability

[Ben Cooksley]

On Thu, Mar 28, 2019 at 7:56 PM Konstantin Kharlamov <hi-angel at yandex.ru> wrote:
>
>
>
> On Чт, Mar 28, 2019 at 19:40, Ben Cooksley <bcooksley at kde.org> wrote:
> > Hi all,
> >
> > We currently have a rather substantial issue, in that the CI system
> > has been once again left in a position where it isn't possible to make
> > any changes to the system.
> >
> > This means we can't update to newer versions of packages, add new
> > packages or correct for binary incompatible changes which periodically
> > get introduced to non-Frameworks.
> >
> > This issue has arisen because currently we have a recurring failure to
> > build from source, within KDE PIM. Specifically, KContacts fails due
> > to broken CMake logic. Despite this breakage having been in place for
> > several days now, and the relevant mailing list being informed
> > automatically by the CI system, the issue has not been corrected.
> >
> > While the most immediate fix is to correct this failure to build from
> > source, that is only a short term fix and does not fix the underlying
> > issue which makes the CI system difficult to maintain - and that is
> > build failure reports being ignored, and people pushing broken code
> > that doesn't even build.
> >
> > (For those wondering, the CI system uses OpenSUSE Tumbleweed, a
> > rolling release distribution, for it's builds, so it isn't a case of
> > old CMake or anything along those lines)
> >
> > We therefore need a long term fix for this. Note that pre-commit (as
> > part of review) CI is not a solution in this instance, as the
> > offending commits did not go through review.
> >
> > Does anyone have any ideas for a long term, proper fix to this?
> >
> > At this point given the amount of effort required to maintain a CI
> > system vs. the amount of care actually being given by some developers
> > (who are ignoring it's failure emails) it becomes questionable whether
> > the effort is worth the return (and if not, we should just shut it
> > down)
> >
> > Regards,
> > Ben Cooksley
> > KDE Sysadmin
>
> I don't know abut the current CI, but judging by recent discussion that
> is about KDE migrating to gitlab; quick search shows gitlab does allow
> prohibiting a merge if CI failed¹
>
> Note however, in my experience of contributing to diffrent project CI
> often fails for reasons absolutely irrelevant to code being tested
> (e.g. errors in a CI script), in this case prohibiting a merge may
> worsen the situation.

Please note that the commits in this instance were pushed without
review, so restrictions on merge requests wouldn't make a difference
in this case unfortunately.

>
> 1:
> https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/merge_requests/merge_when_pipeline_succeeds.html#only-allow-merge-requests-to-be-merged-if-the-pipeline-succeeds
>
>

Cheers,
Ben