Re: [PATCH] gitlab: remove unreliable avocado CI jobs

[Daniel P . Berrangé]

On Tue, Sep 12, 2023 at 11:06:11AM -0400, Stefan Hajnoczi wrote:
> The avocado-system-alpine, avocado-system-fedora, and
> avocado-system-ubuntu jobs are unreliable. I identified them while
> looking over CI failures from the past week:
> https://gitlab.com/qemu-project/qemu/-/jobs/5058610614
> https://gitlab.com/qemu-project/qemu/-/jobs/5058610654
> https://gitlab.com/qemu-project/qemu/-/jobs/5030428571
> 
> Thomas Huth suggest on IRC today that there may be a legitimate failure
> in there:
> 
>   th_huth: f4bug, yes, seems like it does not start at all correctly on
>   alpine anymore ... and it's broken since ~ 2 weeks already, so if nobody
>   noticed this by now, this is worrying
> 
> It crept in because the jobs were already unreliable.
> 
> I don't know how to interpret the job output, so all I can do is to
> propose removing these jobs. A useful CI job has two outcomes: pass or
> fail. Timeouts and other in-between states are not useful because they
> require constant triaging by someone who understands the details of the
> tests and they can occur when run against pull requests that have
> nothing to do with the area covered by the test.
> 
> Hopefully test owners will be able to identify the root causes and solve
> them so that these jobs can stay. In their current state the jobs are
> not useful since I cannot cannot tell whether job failures are real or
> just intermittent when merging qemu.git pull requests.
> 
> If you are a test owner, please take a look.
> 
> It is likely that other avocado-system-* CI jobs have similar failures
> from time to time, but I'll leave them as long as they are passing.
> 
> Buglink: https://gitlab.com/qemu-project/qemu/-/issues/1884
> Signed-off-by: Stefan Hajnoczi <stefanha@redhat.com>
> ---
>  .gitlab-ci.d/buildtest.yml | 27 ---------------------------
>  1 file changed, 27 deletions(-)
> 
> diff --git a/.gitlab-ci.d/buildtest.yml b/.gitlab-ci.d/buildtest.yml
> index aee9101507..83ce448c4d 100644
> --- a/.gitlab-ci.d/buildtest.yml
> +++ b/.gitlab-ci.d/buildtest.yml
> @@ -22,15 +22,6 @@ check-system-alpine:
>      IMAGE: alpine
>      MAKE_CHECK_ARGS: check-unit check-qtest
>  
> -avocado-system-alpine:
> -  extends: .avocado_test_job_template
> -  needs:
> -    - job: build-system-alpine
> -      artifacts: true
> -  variables:
> -    IMAGE: alpine
> -    MAKE_CHECK_ARGS: check-avocado

Instead of entirely deleting, I'd suggest adding

   # Disabled due to frequent random failures
   # https://gitlab.com/qemu-project/qemu/-/issues/1884
   when: manual

See example: https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/yaml/#when

This disables the job from running unless someone explicitly
tells it to run

> -
>  build-system-ubuntu:
>    extends:
>      - .native_build_job_template
> @@ -53,15 +44,6 @@ check-system-ubuntu:
>      IMAGE: ubuntu2204
>      MAKE_CHECK_ARGS: check
>  
> -avocado-system-ubuntu:
> -  extends: .avocado_test_job_template
> -  needs:
> -    - job: build-system-ubuntu
> -      artifacts: true
> -  variables:
> -    IMAGE: ubuntu2204
> -    MAKE_CHECK_ARGS: check-avocado
> -
>  build-system-debian:
>    extends:
>      - .native_build_job_template
> @@ -127,15 +109,6 @@ check-system-fedora:
>      IMAGE: fedora
>      MAKE_CHECK_ARGS: check
>  
> -avocado-system-fedora:
> -  extends: .avocado_test_job_template
> -  needs:
> -    - job: build-system-fedora
> -      artifacts: true
> -  variables:
> -    IMAGE: fedora
> -    MAKE_CHECK_ARGS: check-avocado
> -
>  crash-test-fedora:
>    extends: .native_test_job_template
>    needs:
> -- 
> 2.41.0
> 
> 

With regards,
Daniel
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