Depending on the workflows of individual developers, it can either be
convenient or annoying that our GitHub Actions CI jobs are run on every
branch. As an example of annoying: if you carry many half-finished
work-in-progress branches and rebase them frequently against master,
you'd get tons of failure reports that aren't interesting (not to
mention the wasted CPU).
This commit adds a new job which checks a special branch within the
repository for CI config, and then runs a shell script it finds there to
decide whether to skip the rest of the tests. The default will continue
to run tests for all refs if that branch or script is missing.
There have been a few alternatives discussed:
One option is to carry information in the commit itself about whether it
should be tested, either in the tree itself (changing the workflow YAML
file) or in the commit message (a "[skip ci]" flag or similar). But
these are frustrating and error-prone to use:
- you have to manually apply them to each branch that you want to mark
- it's easy for them to leak into other workflows, like emailing patches
We could likewise try to get some information from the branch name. But
that leads to debates about whether the default should be "off" or "on",
and overriding still ends up somewhat awkward. If we default to "on",
you have to remember to name your branches appropriately to skip CI. And
if "off", you end up having to contort your branch names or duplicate
your pushes with an extra refspec.
By comparison, this commit's solution lets you specify your config once
and forget about it, and all of the data is off in its own ref, where it
can be changed by individual forks without touching the main tree.
There were a few design decisions that came out of on-list discussion.
I'll summarize here:
- we could use GitHub's API to retrieve the config ref, rather than a
real checkout (and then just operate on it via some javascript). We
still have to spin up a VM and contact GitHub over the network from
it either way, so it ends up not being much faster. I opted to go
with shell to keep things similar to our other tools (and really
could implement allow-refs in any language you want). This also makes
it easy to test your script locally, and to modify it within the
context of a normal git.git tree.
- we could keep the well-known refname out of refs/heads/ to avoid
cluttering the branch namespace. But that makes it awkward to
manipulate. By contrast, you can just "git checkout ci-config" to
make changes.
- we could assume the ci-config ref has nothing in it except config
(i.e., a branch unrelated to the rest of git.git). But dealing with
orphan branches is awkward. Instead, we'll do our best to efficiently
check out only the ci/config directory using a shallow partial clone,
which allows your ci-config branch to be just a normal branch, with
your config changes on top.
- we could provide a simpler interface, like a static list of ref
patterns. But we can't get out of spinning up a whole VM anyway, so
we might as well use that feature to make the config as flexible as
possible. If we add more config, we should be able to reuse our
partial-clone to set more outputs.
Signed-off-by: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Arguably, CI builds' most important task is to not only identify
regressions, but to make it as easy as possible to investigate what went
wrong.
In that light, we will want to provide users with a way to inspect the
tests' output as well as the corresponding directories.
This commit adds build steps that are only executed when tests failed,
uploading the relevant information as build artifacts. These artifacts
can then be downloaded by interested parties to diagnose the failures
more efficiently.
Signed-off-by: Johannes Schindelin <johannes.schindelin@gmx.de>
Signed-off-by: Đoàn Trần Công Danh <congdanhqx@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
This patch adds CI builds via GitHub Actions. While the underlying
technology is at least _very_ similar to that of Azure Pipelines, GitHub
Actions are much easier to set up than Azure Pipelines:
- no need to install a GitHub App,
- no need to set up an Azure DevOps account,
- all you need to do is push to your fork on GitHub.
Therefore, it makes a lot of sense for us to have a working GitHub
Actions setup.
While copy/editing `azure-pipelines.yml` into
`.github/workflows/main.yml`, we also use the opportunity to accelerate
the step that sets up a minimal subset of Git for Windows' SDK in the
Windows-build job:
- we now download a `.tar.xz` stored in Azure Blobs and extract it
simultaneously by calling `curl` and piping the result to `tar`,
- decompressing via `xz`,
- all three utilities are installed together with Git for Windows
At the same time, we also make use of the matrix build feature, which
reduces the amount of repeated text by quite a bit.
Also, we do away with the parts that try to mount a file share on which
`prove` can store data between runs. It is just too complicated to set
up, and most times the tree changes anyway, so there is little return on
investment there.
Initial-patch-by: Johannes Schindelin <johannes.schindelin@gmx.de>
Signed-off-by: Johannes Schindelin <johannes.schindelin@gmx.de>
Signed-off-by: Đoàn Trần Công Danh <congdanhqx@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
In the contributing guide and PR template seen by people who open pull
requests on GitHub, we mention the submitGit tool, which gives an
alternative to figuring out the mailing list. These days we also have
the similar GitGitGadget tool, and we should make it clear that this
is also an option.
We could continue to mention _both_ tools, but it's probably better to
pick one in order to avoid overwhelming the user with choice. After all,
one of the purposes here is to reduce friction for first-time or
infrequent contributors. And there are a few reasons to prefer GGG:
1. submitGit seems to still have a few rough edges. E.g., it doesn't
munge timestamps to help threaded mail readers handled out-of-order
delivery.
2. Subjectively, GGG seems to be more commonly used on the list these
days, especially by list regulars.
3. GGG seems to be under more active development (likely related to
point 2).
So let's actually swap out submitGit for GGG. While we're there, let's
put another link to the GGG page in the PR template, because that's
where users who are learning about it for the first time will want to go
to read more.
Signed-off-by: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Many open source projects use github.com for their contribution process.
Although we mirror the Git core repository to github.com [1] we do not
use any other github.com service. This is unknown/unexpected to a
number of (potential) contributors and consequently they create Pull
Requests against our mirror with their contributions. These Pull
Requests become stale. This is frustrating to them as they think we
ignore them and it is also unsatisfactory for us as we miss potential
code improvements and/or new contributors.
GitHub contribution guidelines and a GitHub Pull Request template that
is visible to every Pull Request creator can be configured with special
files in a Git repository [2]. Let's make use of this!
[1] https://github.com/git/git
[2] https://help.github.com/articles/creating-a-pull-request-template-for-your-repository/
Signed-off-by: Lars Schneider <larsxschneider@gmail.com>
Helped-by: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Jeff King
Johannes Schindelin
Đoàn Trần Công Danh
Lars Schneider