Re: [PATCH] ci: respect the [skip ci] convention in our GitHub workflow "CI/PR"

> On Sat, May 02, 2020 at 03:08:07PM +0000, Johannes Schindelin via GitGitGadget wrote:
> 
> >     It was mentioned to me that it might not be totally helpful to run all 
> >     the builds whenever an in-progress branch is pushed to GitHub. For
> >     example, if a contributor has dozens of topic branches in flight, they
> >     might not want to have all of them built whenever a new end-of-day push
> >     happens.
> 
> As I was probably (one of) the mentioners here, thank you for looking
> into this. This definitely _helps_, and if you don't want to go further
> I could certainly make do with it[1].
> 
> But here are some thoughts on what a more ideal solution would look
> like (to me, anyway).
> 
> What I'd _most_ like is a separately-maintained list of branches (or
> branch patterns) on which to run CI.  I mostly care about just testing
> my personal equivalent of "next" (which is really "next" plus my stable
> topics), and I'd probably only list that branch. Plus potentially a
> special CI branch that I'd use when chasing down a failure that I can't
> reproduce locally.
> 
> But I don't think there's any good way to implement that via GitHub
> Actions. I thought perhaps we could pull data from a different branch in
> the same repo, but referring to external "Actions" seems to require a
> full repo name (and obviously putting git/git in that name doesn't help
> anybody who's trying to override something in a fork).
> 
> Another alternative: could we trigger CI based on branch-names? Locally,
> I call my unstable branches "jk/something-wip", and I'd like to skip all
> of the "-wip" branches. That's basically equivalent to "[skip ci]" in
> that I could just amend the tip commit of the -wip branches to say "skip
> ci". But what if we flipped the default to _not_ build? I.e.:
> 
>   - continue to build all pull requests; if you opened one, you're
>     serious enough to have other people look and should get CI feedback
> 
>   - build branches with a few well-known names or patterns. Maybe
>     names like "master"? Or maybe "refs/heads/build-ci/*"? Or maybe
>     anything in "refs/heads/<initials>/*"? We'd have to decide on a
>     convention as a community.