Re: [RFC PATCH 14/15] gitlab-ci: Allow forks to use different set of jobs

[Thomas Huth]

On 19/04/2021 12.10, Erik Skultety wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 19, 2021 at 10:40:53AM +0100, Daniel P. Berrangé wrote:
> > On Mon, Apr 19, 2021 at 01:34:47AM +0200, Philippe Mathieu-Daudé wrote:
> > > Forks run the same jobs than mainstream, which might be overkill.
> > > Allow them to easily rebase their custom set, while keeping using
> > > the mainstream templates, and ability to pick specific jobs from
> > > the mainstream set.
> > >
> > > To switch to your set, simply add your .gitlab-ci.yml as
> > > .gitlab-ci.d/${CI_PROJECT_NAMESPACE}.yml (where CI_PROJECT_NAMESPACE
> > > is your gitlab 'namespace', usually username). This file will be
> > > used instead of the default mainstream set.
> >
> > I find this approach undesirable, because AFAICT, it means you have
> > to commit this extra file to any of your downstream branches that
> > you want this to be used for.  Then you have to be either delete it
> > again before sending patches upstream, or tell git-publish to
> > exclude the commit that adds this.
> >
> > IMHO any per-contributor overhead needs to not involve committing
> > stuff to their git branches, that isn't intended to go upstream.
>
> Not just that, ideally, they should also run all the upstream workloads before
> submitting a PR or posting patches because they'd have to respin because of a
> potential failure in upstream pipelines anyway.

It's pretty clear that you want to run the full QEMU CI before submitting 
patches to the QEMU project, but I think we are rather talking about forks 
here that are meant not meant for immediately contributing to upstream 
again, like RHEL where we only build the KVM-related targets and certainly 
do not want to test other things like CPUs that are not capable of KVM, or a 
branch where Philippe only wants to check his MIPS-related work during 
development.
For contributing patches to upstream, you certainly have to run the full CI, 
but for other things, it's sometimes really useful to cut down the CI 
machinery (I'm also doing this in my development branches manually some 
times to speed up the CI), so I think this series make sense, indeed.

 Thomas