Re: CI "pages" job failing with incomprehensible error message from htags

[Peter Maydell]

On Mon, 8 Jan 2024 at 14:41, Bui Quang Minh <minhquangbui99@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 1/8/24 18:03, Thomas Huth wrote:
> > On 05/01/2024 20.11, Peter Maydell wrote:
> >> https://gitlab.com/qemu-project/qemu/-/jobs/5871592479
> >>
> >> failed with
> >>
> >> $ htags -anT --tree-view=filetree -m qemu_init -t "Welcome to the QEMU
> >> sourcecode"
> >> htags: Negative exec line limit = -371
> >>
> >> Does anybody have any idea what this is about ?
> >
> > In case you haven't spotted it yet:
> >
> > https://www.mail-archive.com/qemu-devel@nongnu.org/msg1014394.html
> >
> > Is anybody already already creating a patch to clear CI_COMMIT_MESSAGE
> > when invoking htags ?
>
> That solution works fine on my CI, however, it is stated in Gitlab
> documentation that overriding predefined variables is not recommended.
>
>         https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/variables/predefined_variables.html
>         Avoid overriding predefined variables, as it can cause the pipeline to
> behave unexpectedly.

https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/variables/index.html#override-a-defined-cicd-variable
says that what it means by "overriding" a pipeline variable is
setting it *before* the pipeline is run, so that it changes
the behaviour of the pipeline.

What we're proposing to do here is instead that within the
pipeline we just effectively hide the environment variable
from the htags process (which will not do anything complex
like invoke other parts of the gitlab pipelin machinery).
So it isn't what they mean by overriding things and should
be fine.

thanks
-- PMM