RFR: 8282944: GHA: Add Alpine Linux x86_64 pre-integration check [v8]

[Aleksey Shipilev]

On Thu, 15 Aug 2024 10:26:17 GMT, George Adams <gdams at openjdk.org> wrote:

>> Adds Alpine build CI job to the GitHub actions matrix. Currently this only builds hotspot. I can add tests too if people think that would be useful but for now I've left it as just build.
>
> George Adams has updated the pull request with a new target base due to a merge or a rebase. The pull request now contains 10 commits:
> 
>  - Merge branch 'master' into alpine
>  - skip gtest and jtreg
>  - add Java 17 for jtreg
>  - add wget
>  - fix order of tasks
>  - fix alpine skip
>  - force grep newline
>  - fix test bundle
>  - add make-target: 'hotspot'
>  - 8282944: GHA: Add Alpine Linux x86_64 pre-integration check

Honestly, I am ambivalent about this. This only captures the Hotspot build errors, which I think are rare for Alpine, judging by looking around the JBS. And it makes sense: the build failures looks basically around compiling against weird libc APIs that might not be supported by musl. I think most of the issues with Alpine are runtime problems in tests?

So it looks that building only Hotspot is in weird spot: we spend time without getting much of the testing off it. How bad would it be to run testing with Alpine? That would probably not be very well received, though, if no one could debug Alpine test failures...

Tangentially, I think we should start thinking about extended workflows that are _not_ run by default PR-triggers, so you could potentially run them if you wanted for Alpine-specific fixes. This would making the decisions like this rather easy.

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PR Comment: https://git.openjdk.org/jdk/pull/20577#issuecomment-2291572564