[Intel-gfx] [Mesa-dev] gitlab.fd.o financial situation and impact on services

[Jason Ekstrand]

I don't think we need to worry so much about the cost of CI that we need to 
micro-optimize to to get the minimal number of CI runs. We especially 
shouldn't if it begins to impact coffee quality, people's ability to merge 
patches in a timely manner, or visibility into what went wrong when CI 
fails. I've seen a number of suggestions which will do one or both of those 
things including:

 - Batching merge requests
 - Not running CI on the master branch
 - Shutting off CI
 - Preventing CI on other non-MR branches
 - Disabling CI on WIP MRs
 - I'm sure there are more...

I think there are things we can do to make CI runs more efficient with some 
sort of end-point caching and we can probably find some truly wasteful CI 
to remove. Most of the things in the list above, I've seen presented by 
people who are only lightly involved the project to my knowledge (no 
offense to anyone intended).  Developers depend on the CI system for their 
day-to-day work and hampering it will only show down development, reduce 
code quality, and ultimately hurt our customers and community. If we're so 
desperate as to be considering painful solutions which will have a negative 
impact on development, we're better off trying to find more money.

--Jason

On March 1, 2020 13:51:32 Jacob Lifshay <programmerjake at gmail.com> wrote:
> One idea for Marge-bot (don't know if you already do this):
> Rust-lang has their bot (bors) automatically group together a few merge 
> requests into a single merge commit, which it then tests, then, then the 
> tests pass, it merges. This could help reduce CI runs to once a day (or 
> some other rate). If the tests fail, then it could automatically deduce 
> which one failed, by recursive subdivision or similar. There's also a 
> mechanism to adjust priority and grouping behavior when the defaults aren't 
> sufficient.
>
> Jacob
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