Jenkins expertise?

[Eric Timmons]

https://gitlab.common-lisp.net/asdf/asdf/-/merge_requests/146 uses
cl.net's shared Gitlab CI runners. It appears that the shared runner can
only run one job at a time, so the pipeline that MR introduces takes
close to an hour to run (and that's only testing with four
implementations). I also suspect no pipelines from other projects were
running at the time.

If the CLF or someone else can provide additional runners for ASDF's
use, that would be a nice way to cut down on pipeline time and avoid
impacting other projects.

However, as much as I love Gitlab CI, the "core" tier of it (what I
/believe/ cl.net runs) does have some limitations that, given my limited
Jenkins knowledge, a properly configured Jenkins setup wouldn't have.

First, the core tier is unable to test against the merged result of an
MR. I don't think that one's a deal breaker as any CI is better than
none at all, issues are unlikely if the merge has no conflicts, and any
issues would be quickly found after the merge completed (and either
fixed or rolled back). Alternatively, ASDF could enforce (via Gitlab)
that MRs need to be rebased on to the target branch, effectively making
the source branch equivalent to the merged result.

The tougher one to work around is caused by the forking model of
contributing code. Forks are unable to use their parent's CI runners and
the pipelines for MRs from forks are run in the CI context of the
fork. So if ASDF has special runners for the licensed implementations
they can't be used until the MR is merged. Additionally, the pipelines
before merging will be slow as they'll be using the cl.net shared CI
runners.

There are a couple of ways to deal with the second issue, but they all
have their drawbacks. The best way would likely be to pull contributions
from forks into a separate branch in the parent repo before merging to
master. That would allow any ASDF specific runners to do their job, but
would require some extra steps from the maintainers. (And contributors
would just have to deal with their jobs running slowly before the
merge). I'm sure a sufficiently motivated person could even write a
Gitlab CI job that auto merged to master from this testing branch if the
tests all pass.

-Eric

"Robert P. Goldman" <rpgoldman at sift.net> writes:

> Thanks for reaching out , Dave. I hadn't realized that cl.net had the full gitlab CI hooked up to it. Are there any resource issues? There are a lot of projects hosted there.  
>
> That said, are there sufficient resources there if we start running a pipeline?
>
> --  
> Robert P. Goldman  
>
> On October 14, 2020 at 07:21:44, Dave Cooper (david.cooper at genworks.com(mailto:david.cooper at genworks.com)) wrote:
>
>>  
>> Dear Robert,
>>  
>> Are you sure you want to use Jenkins? Gitlab has built-in CI. And the CLF has acquired Allegro CL licenses for a ASDF testing (graciously donated by Franz Inc), and we have a to-do item to attempt the same for LispWorks. If you’re willing, we would like to help set up ASDF testing pipelines as part of common-lisp.net(http://common-lisp.net) infrastructure.
>>  
>> If you have reasons of your own to set up a Jenkins setup and could use access to Allegro and maybe Lispworks licenses for that purpose, please reach out regarding that as well. I am not sure about any Jenkins experience among clf or cl.net(http://cl.net) volunteers, however.  
>>  
>> Please advise,  
>>  
>> Dave  
>>  
>>  
>>  
>> On Tue, Oct 13, 2020 at 11:06 PM Robert Goldman <rpgoldman at sift.info(mailto:rpgoldman at sift.info)> wrote:
>> >  
>> > Does anyone have expertise configuring Jenkins to run against a remote Gitlab install?
>> >  
>> >  
>> > If so, would you please reach out to me? I have finally restored some of my CI support for ASDF, but I don't know how to set up my Jenkins to run against merge requests on Gitlab (if that is even possible).
>> >  
>> >  
>> > I have a backlog of patches that I would like to get evaluated and merged, but could use some help with the automation.
>> >  
>> >  
>> > Thanks!
>> >  
>> >  
>> >  
>> >  
>>  
>>  
>>  
>> --
>> My Best,
>>  
>> Dave Cooper, david.cooper at gen.works
>> genworks.com(http://genworks.com), gendl.org(http://gendl.org)
>> +1 248-330-2979
>>