Clarification regarding the GitHub Actions pre-submit testing

[Aleksey Shipilev]

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.

-- 
Thanks,
-Aleksey