Re: Should we maybe move Cirrus-CI jobs away from Gitlab again?

[Thomas Huth <thuth@redhat.com>]

On 27/09/2022 19.57, Daniel P. Berrangé wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 27, 2022 at 01:36:20PM -0400, Stefan Hajnoczi wrote:
>> On Tue, 27 Sept 2022 at 11:54, Daniel P. Berrangé <berrange@redhat.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> On Tue, Sep 27, 2022 at 11:44:45AM -0400, Stefan Hajnoczi wrote:
>>>> On Tue, 27 Sept 2022 at 05:02, Thomas Huth <thuth@redhat.com> wrote:
>>>>> now that Gitlab is giving us pressure on the amount of free CI minutes, I
>>>>> wonder whether we should maybe move the Cirrus-CI jobs out of the gitlab-CI
>>>>> dashboard again? We could add the jobs to our .cirrus-ci.yml file instead,
>>>>> like we did it in former times...
>>>>>
>>>>> Big advantage would be of course that the time for those jobs would not
>>>>> count in the Gitlab-CI minutes anymore. Disadvantage is of course that they
>>>>> do not show up in the gitlab-CI dashboard anymore, so there is no more
>>>>> e-mail notification about failed jobs, and you have to push to github, too,
>>>>> and finally check the results manually on cirrus-ci.com ...
>>>>
>>>> My understanding is that .gitlab-ci.d/cirrus.yml uses a GitLab CI job
>>>> to run the cirrus-run container image that forwards jobs to Cirrus-CI.
>>>> So GitLab CI resources are consumed waiting for Cirrus-CI to finish.
>>>>
>>>> This shouldn't affect gitlab.com/qemu-project where there are private
>>>> runners that do not consume GitLab CI minutes.
>>>>
>>>> Individual developers are affected though because they most likely
>>>> rely on the GitLab shared runner minutes quota.
>>>
>>> NB, none of the jobs should ever be run automatically anymore in
>>> QEMU CI pipelines. It always requires the maintainer to set the
>>> env var when pushing to git, to explicitly create a pipeline.
>>> You can then selectively start each individual job as desired.
>>
>> Cirrus CI is not automatically started when pushing to a personal
>> GitLab repo? If starting it requires manual action anyway then I think
>> nothing needs to be changed here.
> 
> No pipeline at all is created unless you do
> 
>    git push -o ci.variable=QEMU_CI=1 <your-fork-remote>
> 
> that creates the pipeliune but doesn't run any jobs - they're manual
> start.

Yes, sure, the jobs are not started automatically. But I *do* want to run 
the jobs before sending pull requests - but since the gitlab-CI minutes are 
now very limited, I'd like to avoid burning these minutes via gitlab and 
start those jobs directly on cirrus-ci.com again. For that the jobs would 
need to be moved to our .cirrus-ci.yml file again.

Well, maybe we could also have both, jobs via cirrus-run for those who want 
to see them in their gitlab-CI dashboard, and via .cirrus-ci.yml for those 
who want to avoid burning CI minutes on Gitlab. It's a little bit of 
double-maintenance, but maybe acceptable?

  Thomas