That is actually very good idea, thanks! Eventually distro jobs take the way less time then source ones anyway, so I wasn't thinking a lot how to optimize them, while it's also important. So pushed [1] to cover that. Unfortunatelly haven't found the way to properly flatten the list of projects in case of yaml anchors usage :(
for example osa support both source and non souce installs correct. the non souce installs dont need the openstack pojects just the osa repos since it will be using the binary packages.
so if you had a second intermeitady job of the souce install the the openstack compoenta repos listed you could skip updating 50 repos in your binary jobs (im assumning the _distro_ jobs are binary by the way.) currenlty its updating 105 for every job that is based on openstack-ansible-deploy-aio
[1] https://review.opendev.org/c/openstack/openstack-ansible/+/774372/1/zuul.d/j... -- Kind Regards, Dmitriy Rabotyagov