[Mesa-dev] Merge blocked

[Gert Wollny]

Hello Jose, 

On Tue, 2021-09-21 at 11:48 +0000, Jose Fonseca wrote:
> Why doesn't Gilab allow one to merge manually?
> 
> See https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/merge_requests/12940:
> 
>  * Marge-bot failed to merge the PR due to 2 flaky tests, completely
> unrelated to the commits in question.

I can understand your frustration with the flaky tests, but I'm sure
you know that having a CI is place helps a lot to not break most of the
code, so merging without having to go through the CI is not really an
option, even if we are all sensible adults. 

Maybe we all should just file bugs when we see a flaky test, so that
those get flagged accordingly by the developers responsible for the
related drivers. 

> 
>  * I manually retried the failed tests, and they all passed, but
> still Gitlab refused to allow to merge: it said I needed to rebase.
This is, because Marge merged some other MR between the time you
rebased the last time. Since the pre-merge CI was added and before
Marge was introduced, this actually happened quite regularly: Press the
Merge-when-pipeline-succeeds button and fail, because some other merge
request was already in the pipeline and got merged before your pipeline
finished.
However, nowadays you don't need to rebase yourself, once you assign
the MR to Marge and she will do that for you when she starts to handle
your merge request. 

>  * I rebased, but still Gitlab refused to merge: now it expects the
> pipelines to be runagain!
I'm really sorry for your frustration, but if you're sure that the
merge failed only because if flaky tests, then simply reassigning the 
MR to Marge will do.

> Is it really necessary to go to git command line to get a PR
> merged!?  (I was forced to do so 2-3 times now, but it's a hassle.) 
No, it is not necessary, because Marge will do that for you, once you
assign the MR to her.

> Or run pipelines over and over until one eventually succeeds?
This is only a problem because of the flaky tests, and yes, we should
do something about this. 

> Sorry for the rant, but I didn't notice anybody else complain.  Am I
> the only bothered here?  Or is there a better way here I don't know
> of?
As you sure have understood at this point, the answer is "Assign to
Marge" ;)

Best regards, 
Gert