[libvirt PATCH 1/2] gitlab-ci.yaml: Introduce a variable to disable long broken jobs

[Andrea Bolognani]

On Mon, 2021-01-11 at 13:53 +0000, Daniel P. Berrangé wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 11, 2021 at 02:42:54PM +0100, Erik Skultety wrote:
> > Unfortunately GitLab doesn't have a different mechanism on how to mark
> > jobs as skipped or disabled apart from the 'only'/'except' pragmas.
> > Use the 'except' pragma for the job templates to skip jobs which define
> > the DISABLE_JOB variable.
> 
> What's wrong with using
> 
>    when: never  (or manual to let devs force it from the UI)
> 
> or
> 
>    allow_failure: true
> 
> for any jobs we have problem with.

Personally, I like the idea of using something extremely explicit
and specific, let's say

  TEMPORARILY_ALLOW_FAILURE: true

because then it becomes possible to tell at a glance, without having
to dig through the git history, whether a certain job is known to be
affected by some temporary issue, possibly one that's beyond our
control.

I also believe we should not skip jobs in these cases, but rather
start them and allow them to fail, so that we will be reminded about
the temporary issue by the soft-failure icon (it's orange IIRC) on
the pipeline status page.

-- 
Andrea Bolognani / Red Hat / Virtualization