[dpdk-ci] [RFC] Proposal for allowing rerun of tests

[Kevin Traynor]

On 13/04/2021 14:50, Aaron Conole wrote:
> Greetings,
> 
> During the various CI pipelines, sometimes a test setup or lab will
> have an internal failure unrelated to the specific patch.  Perhaps
> 'master' branch (or the associated -next branch) is broken and we cannot
> get a successful run anyway.  Perhaps a network outage occurs during
> infrastructure setup.  Perhaps some other transient error clobbers the
> setup.  In all of these cases the report to the mailing flags the patch
> as 'FAIL'.
> 
> It would be very helpful if maintainers had the ability to tell various
> CI infrastructures to restart / rerun patch tests.  For now, this has to
> be done by the individual managers of those labs.  Some labs, it isn't
> possible.  Others, it's possible but is a very time-consuming process to
> restart a test case.  In all cases, a maintainer needs to spend time
> communicating with a lab manager.  This could be made a bit nicer.
> 

Just to tie two relevant threads together. I made a request in 
http://mails.dpdk.org/archives/ci/2022-January/001593.html for a 
"retest" button (or really any manual but self-sufficient way) to 
kick-off immediately what is run in periodic branch testing. Something 
might be there already, that i'm just not aware of.

This could be used by LTS maintainers, and possibly main, *-next branch 
maintainers coming up to releases.

thanks,
Kevin.

> One proposal we (Michael and I) have toyed with for our lab is having
> the infrastructure monitor patchwork comments for a restart flag, and
> kick off based on that information.  Patchwork tracks all of the
> comments for each patch / series so we could look at the series that
> are still in a state for 'merging' (new, assigned, etc) and check the
> patch .comments API for new comments.  Getting the data from PW should
> be pretty simple - but I think that knowing whether to kick off the
> test might be more difficult.  We have concerns about which messages we
> should accept (for example, can anyone ask for a series to be rerun, and
> we'll need to track which rerun messages we've accepted).  The
> convention needs to be something we all can work with (ie: /Re-check:
> [checkname] or something as a single line in the email).
> 
> This is just a start to identify and explain the concern.  Maybe there
> are other issues we've not considered, or maybe folks think this is a
> terrible idea not worth spending any time developing.  I think there's
> enough use for it that I am raising it here, and we can discuss it.
> 
> Thanks,
> -Aaron
>