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
>