Re: [RFC PATCH 14/15] gitlab-ci: Allow forks to use different set of jobs

[Philippe Mathieu-Daudé]

On 4/19/21 11:40 AM, Daniel P. Berrangé wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 19, 2021 at 01:34:47AM +0200, Philippe Mathieu-Daudé wrote:
>> Forks run the same jobs than mainstream, which might be overkill.
>> Allow them to easily rebase their custom set, while keeping using
>> the mainstream templates, and ability to pick specific jobs from
>> the mainstream set.
>>
>> To switch to your set, simply add your .gitlab-ci.yml as
>> .gitlab-ci.d/${CI_PROJECT_NAMESPACE}.yml (where CI_PROJECT_NAMESPACE
>> is your gitlab 'namespace', usually username). This file will be
>> used instead of the default mainstream set.
> 
> I find this approach undesirable, because AFAICT, it means you have
> to commit this extra file to any of your downstream branches that
> you want this to be used for.  Then you have to be either delete it
> again before sending patches upstream, or tell git-publish to
> exclude the commit that adds this.

Good point. What I'm looking for is allow fork to keep following the
mainstream development.

> IMHO any per-contributor overhead needs to not involve committing
> stuff to their git branches, that isn't intended to go upstream.

But why am I forced to run the upstream overhead stuff into my fork?
I find it counter-productive for my limited set of topic I'm modifying.
Also, why should I wait >2h for a pipeline when I exactly know which
area I'm modifying? This is a waste of time and resources.

Gitlab suggested an alternative 3 months ago, it is still fresh:
https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/yaml/README.html#variables-with-include
combined with
https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/yaml/README.html#includeremote
and
https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/yaml/README.html#multiple-files-from-a-project
we could have forks include their gitlab-ci.yml from a specific branch
of their repository.

Example, if I push a branch named project-specific-ci, and we add
that to mainstream:

  include:
  - project: '$CI_PROJECT_PATH'
    ref: project-specific-ci
    file:
      - '/.gitlab-ci.d/project-specific.yml'

The it would include
project-specific-ci:/.gitlab-ci.d/project-specific.yml in all
branches/tags I push.

In that case we could rename qemu-project.yml -> project-specific.yml
(patch 12).

The problem is I couldn't have it optionally working (when there is
no 'project-specific-ci' branch).

Still room for investigation...

Thanks for the feedback,

Phil.