Re: [PATCH v1] gitlab-ci.yml: Speed up CI by using "meson test --no-rebuild"

[Daniel P . Berrangé]

On Mon, Jan 25, 2021 at 10:51:04AM +0100, Paolo Bonzini wrote:
> On 25/01/21 10:03, Thomas Huth wrote:
> > Currently, our check-system-* jobs are recompiling the whole sources
> > again. This happens due to the fact that the jobs are checking out
> > the whole source tree and required submodules again, and only try
> > to use the "build" directory with the binaries and object files
> > as an artifact from the previous stage - which simply does not work
> > anymore (with the current version of meson). Due to some changed
> > time stamps, meson is always trying to rebuild the whole tree.
> > 
> > To fix this problem, we can use "meson test --no-rebuild" instead of
> > make check" to avoid rebuilding all binaries every time. However, the
> > iotests ("make check-block") are not run by "meson test", so we have
> > to execute these manually now. But instead of adding them to the same
> > job as "meson test", it's better to put them into a separate new job
> > instead, to keep things nicely running in parallel in the CI.
> > This saves ca. 15 - 20 minutes of precious CI cycles in each run.
> 
> The reason why we're not using "meson test" is that the reporting is (still)
> inferior to what you get from "make check", especially with respect to which
> tests are failing.  This is being tracked at
> https://github.com/mesonbuild/meson/issues/7830 and the last missing bits
> are at https://github.com/mesonbuild/meson/issues/8200 (after which we'll
> change the "meson test" command line to also include "meson test
> --verbose").
> 
> However, for CI this is a minor issue because we can let GitLab parse the
> XML testing logs.  Can you add something like this to the test jobs for v2?
> 
> +  artifacts:
> +    when: always
> +    paths:
> +      - build/meson-logs/
> +    reports:
> +      junit: build/meson-logs/testlog.junit.xml
> 
> Another possibility could be to use "make check NINJA=:".  I am not sure if
> that works, but if it does it would be the smallest possible workaround.

When I suggested use of --no-rebuild, I was actally thinking that
we would change the Makefile(s) to enable to pass the --no-rebuild
arg to meson. eg

  make check MESON_ARGS=--no-rebuild

is that, or something similar possible ?


Regards,
Daniel
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