CI system maintainability

[Friedrich W. H. Kossebau]

Am Donnerstag, 28. März 2019, 09:29:22 CET schrieb Kevin Ottens:
> Hello,
> 
> On Thursday, 28 March 2019 09:16:11 CET Ben Cooksley wrote:
> > 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.
> 
> Maybe it's about time to make reviews mandatory... I know it's unpopular in
> KDE, and I advocated for "don't force a tool if you can get someone to look
> at your screen or pair with you" in the past. Clearly this compromise gets
> somewhat exploited and that's especially bad in the case of a fragile and
> central component like KDE PIM.

Mandatory reviews in my experience only result in more fake reviews due to 
people pressuring each other to quickly get their simple patches reviewed, 
lowering the general quality of reviews.
Also does the overhead reduce the number of minor improvements, where one (as 
qualified person) simply would have pushed in a minute a fix and get back to 
concentrate on the real work, instead of starting an overhead of having to 
juggle with yet another patch-under-review where the current work depends on.

IMHO the actual problem here is: people do not do their post-push work and 
care for the state on CI.

From what I saw, many breakages happened with reviewed patches. Whole 
releases even get done while CI is reporting failed builds, or at least lots 
of failing tests.

I have no idea how to fix that. We would need to ask the people for whom this 
happens why it does happen, and how we can improve things so that CI checks 
become part of their workflow.

Cheers
Friedrich