https://gitlab.common-lisp.net/asdf/asdf/-/merge_requests/146 uses
cl.net's shared Gitlab CI runners. It appears that the shared runner can
only run one job at a time, so the pipeline that MR introduces takes
close to an hour to run (and that's only testing with four
implementations). I also suspect no pipelines from other projects were
running at the time.
I've increased the number of jobs this runner can run concurrently to 3, because the VM currently has 3 cores configured. If we need to configure more, let me know and I'll have a look at it.
If the CLF or someone else can provide additional runners for ASDF's
use, that would be a nice way to cut down on pipeline time and avoid
impacting other projects.
There is also a machine provisioned for cl-test-grid. It's idle often, just not when a new Quicklisp release has been released. If cl-test-grid could be driven by GitLab CI, it would be easy to share the resources this machine has to spare. In that case, I think 2 extra cores would be available for running tests. It would be even better if others would step up to donate their cores.
However, as much as I love Gitlab CI, the "core" tier of it (what I
/believe/ cl.net runs) does have some limitations that, given my limited
Jenkins knowledge, a properly configured Jenkins setup wouldn't have.
First, the core tier is unable to test against the merged result of an
MR.
I'm not sure what you mean by this. Do you mean that the CI wouldn't run tests/builds on the master branch after merging an MR?
What I do know that works: The current
common-lisp.net site is being built after each merge to the master branch of that repository and the artifacts of the build used to publish the site.
I don't think that one's a deal breaker as any CI is better than
none at all, issues are unlikely if the merge has no conflicts, and any
issues would be quickly found after the merge completed (and either
fixed or rolled back). Alternatively, ASDF could enforce (via Gitlab)
that MRs need to be rebased on to the target branch, effectively making
the source branch equivalent to the merged result.
The tougher one to work around is caused by the forking model of
contributing code. Forks are unable to use their parent's CI runners and
the pipelines for MRs from forks are run in the CI context of the
fork. So if ASDF has special runners for the licensed implementations
they can't be used until the MR is merged. Additionally, the pipelines
before merging will be slow as they'll be using the cl.net shared CI
runners.
If we can disable artifacts on the ASDF runners, we might be able to use a somewhat more liberal assignment of runners to project members: if the artifacts can't be extracted, the options for abuse will become more limited.
There are a couple of ways to deal with the second issue, but they all
have their drawbacks. The best way would likely be to pull contributions
from forks into a separate branch in the parent repo before merging to
master. That would allow any ASDF specific runners to do their job, but
would require some extra steps from the maintainers. (And contributors
would just have to deal with their jobs running slowly before the
merge). I'm sure a sufficiently motivated person could even write a
Gitlab CI job that auto merged to master from this testing branch if the
tests all pass.
That would work too. Let me know what more we can research or I can help with to help solve this issue.
-Eric
Regards,
Erik.