Clarification regarding the GitHub Actions pre-submit testing

[Roman Kennke]

I am not quite sure why all of this even needs discussing. Besides GHA, 
we currently have *zero* gating checks in OpenJDK workflow. Yes we used 
to have jdk-submit repo, but that was *very* awkward. What GHA provides 
us is so much more useful and accessible IMO.

If you don't like it, well, then I think it's ok to ignore it and rely 
only on vendor-internal testing. My opinion is that checking GHA results 
and fixing obvious build breakages is an action of minimal respect vs 
the wider OpenJDK community and the various porters, and most often 
doesn't cost very much (or nothing at all). If something shows up that 
doesn't look related to your change, you can still ignore it, or, if you 
have some ideas, ping the right people.

Roman


> On 3/18/21 3:55 AM, Stuart Marks wrote:
>> On 3/17/21 6:43 AM, Aleksey Shipilev wrote:
>>> TL;DR: I view GHA as the OpenJDK-wide litmus test for the "green" 
>>> master.
>>
>> I think this is premature. Who is responsible for maintaining the 
>> systems on which
>> GHA workflows run? Are they configured correctly and consistently? Who 
>> keeps the
>> configurations up to date? If they are broken, who fixes them? Do they 
>> produce
>> reliable results? etc.
> 
> I believe the answers to some of these questions are in GHA workflow 
> history:
>    
> https://github.com/openjdk/jdk/commits/master/.github/workflows/submit.yml
> 
> Yes, systems-wise with GHA, we are in somewhat awkward position to trust 
> that GH Cloud (Azure?) is configured correctly, runs on proper hardware, 
> and is being maintained. There is a fair amount of trust in this 
> equation. I haven't seen that trust broken in the last half a year the 
> GHA were running for OpenJDK (both for mainline JDK and Codetools 
> projects), so I am keeping hopeful.
> 
> The fact that GHA is not ideal does not make it less useful. As I note 
> in the reply to Mark, the number of follow-up trivial build/test fixes 
> had dropped palpably after GHA were introduced in JDK mainline repo.
> 
>> My main takeaway from Magnus' message is that his team doesn't have these
>> responsibilities. Ok, then who does? Or... is nobody responsible? 
>> (Seems plausible.)
> 
> Again, at present this seems to be the self-appointed duty of some 
> OpenJDK contributors, look at GHA workflow history. If the only thing 
> missing here is formal assignment to maintain this, we can solve that. I 
> am not sure that is a problem worth solving, though, based on our 
> current experience: there are interested parties that do that outside 
> the formal assignment.
>