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

[Peter Hutterer]

On Sat, Apr 04, 2020 at 08:11:23AM -0700, Rob Clark wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 3, 2020 at 7:12 AM Michel Dänzer <michel at daenzer.net> wrote:
> >
> > On 2020-03-01 6:46 a.m., Marek Olšák wrote:
> > > For Mesa, we could run CI only when Marge pushes, so that it's a strictly
> > > pre-merge CI.
> >
> > Thanks for the suggestion! I implemented something like this for Mesa:
> >
> > https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/merge_requests/4432
> >
> 
> I wouldn't mind manually triggering pipelines, but unless there is
> some trick I'm not realizing, it is super cumbersome.  Ie. you have to
> click first the container jobs.. then wait.. then the build jobs..
> then wait some more.. and then finally the actual runners.  That would
> be a real step back in terms of usefulness of CI.. one might call it a
> regression :-(

I *think* this should work though if you set up the right job dependencies.
very simple example:
https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/whot/ci-playground/pipelines/128601

job1 is "when:manual", job2 has "needs: job1", job3 has "needs: job2".
Nothing runs at first, if you trigger job1 it'll cascade down to job 2 and
3.

The main limit you have here are the stages - where a job is part of a stage
but does not have an explicit "needs:" it will wait for the previous stage
to complete. That will never happen if one job in that stage has a manual
dependency. See this pipeline as an example:
https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/whot/ci-playground/pipelines/128605

So basically: if you set up all your jobs with the correct "needs" you could
even have a noop stage for user interface purposes. Here's an example:
https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/whot/ci-playground/pipelines/128606

It has a UI stage with "test-arm" and "test-x86" manual jobs. It has other
stages with dependent jobs on those (cascading down) but it also has 
a set of autorun jobs that run independent of the manual triggers. When you
push, the autorun jobs run. When you trigger "test-arm" manually, it
triggers the various dependent jobs.

So I think what you want to do is possible, it just requires some tweaking
of the "needs" entries.

Cheers,
   Peter