Re: Reducing redundant build at Travis?

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Jul 14, 2017, 12:24 UTC
Message-ID: <20170714122401.uahk2fzvcjj3nwve@sigill.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <xmqqiniwt35e.fsf@gitster.mtv.corp.google.com>

On Thu, Jul 13, 2017 at 02:53:17PM -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote:

Show 16 quoted lines

> >> Unfortunately, https://travis-ci.org/git/git/builds/ shows that it
> >> does not care if it spawned a job to build the tip of 'maint' and
> >> another for 'v2.13.3' that point at the same thing.
> >
> > That is indeed suprising and wasteful. Looks like other people
> > did run into the same issue. How about something like this?
> > https://github.com/mockito/mockito/blob/release/2.x/.travis.yml#L26-L29
> 
> That unfortunately is exactly what I wanted to avoid.
> 
> We'd want to test tagged releases, and we'd want to test usual
> updates to integration branches.  It just is that sometimes the tips
> of integration branches happen to be at the tagged release, so I'd
> prefer to always build tags but skip a branch build if it happens to
> be also tagged.  After all, none of the integration branches may
> directly point at a tagged release when the tag is pushed out.

Right, I think the right solution is some amount of peeling. Recognizing that the commit sha1 is the same, or better yet, not bothering to retest trees which have already been tested.

We used a hacked-up copy of Jenkins for our in-house CI, and it skips already-tested trees. Besides the discussed cases, this also saves time when pushing noop rebases (e.g., when you just changed commit messages) and noop merges (e.g., if you already back-merged master to your topic, tested it, and now do a "merge --no-ff" to merge the topic in). I don't think either of those are common in our workflows, though.

If we had some kind of persistent storage, we could do a quick:

  tree=$(git rev-parse HEAD^{tree})
  if test "$(get_from_storage status-$tree)" = "good"
  then
	echo "Already tested $tree, skipping"
	exit 0
  fi
  ... run actual tests ...
  put_into_storage status-$tree good

The "git test" script[1] uses this strategy with git-notes as the storage, and I've found it quite useful. I don't think we can rely on git-notes, but I think Travis gives us some storage options. Even just a best-effort cache directory would probably be sufficient (this is an optimization, after all).

-Peff

[1] https://github.com/mhagger/git-test