[QGIS-Developer] QGIS repository management

[Sandro Santilli]

On Wed, Oct 18, 2023 at 08:18:46AM +1300, Nyall Dawson via QGIS-Developer wrote:
> >
> > IMHO, the main issue here is that the CI is too often broken for no
> > reasons related to the PR content. And most of the time recently, it's
> > because of one of the mingw jobs.
> 
> I suggest we move this conversation into more practical areas and
> focus instead on the actual CI issues.

CI was only 50% of the issue I raised, the other 50% was government
issues, which practically is acted upon by:

  1. Make roles clearly documented:
     - who can change github configuration in case of problems
     - who is allowed to push to which branches
     - who can apply labels to issues/PRs
     - how the above privileges are granted and revoked

> In my experience there's a couple of main issues here:
> 
> 1. The mingw build fails often with the error:
> 2. The msys2 build can take HOURS (5+ in some cases)
> 3. Random test failures. Main culprits are:
> 4. Docker/ubuntu repository fails
>
> Is there anything I've missed?

Laurențiu (grayshade in Matrix) noticed the Ubuntu-22.04
matrix build is far slower than the Fedora 38 (one), I didn't
dig that up.

Another thing I hit was layout failures in CI that could have
been prevented by having those tests run locally by pre-commit
hooks, like with this 3-days old and green PR:
https://github.com/qgis/QGIS/pull/54936

Each PR triggers 28 workflows, and I looks like a failure in a
layout workflow does not stop the others which contend resources
with other PRs. Today I've seen up to 44 workflows running in
parallel, which slow down each one of them. The more tests developers
can run locally, the lighter we are on the central infrastructure.

In general, I think it's easier if each of these issues we find
is filed as a ticket and labeled with "testsuite" [1] and/or
"CI/GitHub-Actions" [2] as appropriate. 

[1] https://github.com/qgis/QGIS/issues?q=is%3Aopen+is%3Aissue+label%3Atestsuite
[2] https://github.com/qgis/QGIS/issues?q=is%3Aopen+is%3Aissue+label%3ACI%2FGitHub-Actions

--strk;