Re: [dpdklab] Re: [dpdk-ci] [RFC] Proposal for allowing rerun of tests

[Lincoln Lavoie <lylavoie@iol.unh.edu>]

Hi Kevin,

I'll add some notes around this to the 2022 planning doc.  The retests
requests for the periodic tests are tricky from the discussed patchworks /
mailing list approach, because there isn't an associated patch or patch
ID.  So, we just need to document or agree on how to "flag" what the
request is, so the system could uniquely ID what branch / test to rerun.

I'll also add this to the list for the dashboard technical debt as well, as
there may be a graphical interface stuff (i.e. a button) we could add to
the UNH-IOL hosted testing.

Cheers,
Lincoln

On Fri, Jan 21, 2022 at 9:00 AM Kevin Traynor <ktraynor@redhat.com> wrote:

> On 13/04/2021 14:50, Aaron Conole wrote:
> > Greetings,
> >
> > During the various CI pipelines, sometimes a test setup or lab will
> > have an internal failure unrelated to the specific patch.  Perhaps
> > 'master' branch (or the associated -next branch) is broken and we cannot
> > get a successful run anyway.  Perhaps a network outage occurs during
> > infrastructure setup.  Perhaps some other transient error clobbers the
> > setup.  In all of these cases the report to the mailing flags the patch
> > as 'FAIL'.
> >
> > It would be very helpful if maintainers had the ability to tell various
> > CI infrastructures to restart / rerun patch tests.  For now, this has to
> > be done by the individual managers of those labs.  Some labs, it isn't
> > possible.  Others, it's possible but is a very time-consuming process to
> > restart a test case.  In all cases, a maintainer needs to spend time
> > communicating with a lab manager.  This could be made a bit nicer.
> >
>
> Just to tie two relevant threads together. I made a request in
> http://mails.dpdk.org/archives/ci/2022-January/001593.html for a
> "retest" button (or really any manual but self-sufficient way) to
> kick-off immediately what is run in periodic branch testing. Something
> might be there already, that i'm just not aware of.
>
> This could be used by LTS maintainers, and possibly main, *-next branch
> maintainers coming up to releases.
>
> thanks,
> Kevin.
>
> > One proposal we (Michael and I) have toyed with for our lab is having
> > the infrastructure monitor patchwork comments for a restart flag, and
> > kick off based on that information.  Patchwork tracks all of the
> > comments for each patch / series so we could look at the series that
> > are still in a state for 'merging' (new, assigned, etc) and check the
> > patch .comments API for new comments.  Getting the data from PW should
> > be pretty simple - but I think that knowing whether to kick off the
> > test might be more difficult.  We have concerns about which messages we
> > should accept (for example, can anyone ask for a series to be rerun, and
> > we'll need to track which rerun messages we've accepted).  The
> > convention needs to be something we all can work with (ie: /Re-check:
> > [checkname] or something as a single line in the email).
> >
> > This is just a start to identify and explain the concern.  Maybe there
> > are other issues we've not considered, or maybe folks think this is a
> > terrible idea not worth spending any time developing.  I think there's
> > enough use for it that I am raising it here, and we can discuss it.
> >
> > Thanks,
> > -Aaron
> >
>
>

-- 
*Lincoln Lavoie*
Principal Engineer, Broadband Technologies
21 Madbury Rd., Ste. 100, Durham, NH 03824
lylavoie@iol.unh.edu
https://www.iol.unh.edu
+1-603-674-2755 (m)
<https://www.iol.unh.edu>