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

[Aaron Conole <aconole@redhat.com>]

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.

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