Open Stack

On Wed, 2014-01-22 at 15:39 -0500, Sean Dague wrote:
> <snip>
> ==========================
> Executive Summary
> ==========================
> To summarize, the effects of these changes will be:
> 
>  - 1) Decrease the impact of failures resetting the entire gate queue
>    by doing the heavy testing in the check queue where changes are not
>    dependent on each other.
> 
>  - 2) Run a slimmer set of jobs in the gate queue to maintain sanity,
>    but not block as much on existing bugs in OpenStack.
> 
>  - 3) As a result, this should increase our confidence that changes
>    put into the gate will pass. This will help prevent gate resets,
>    and the disruption they cause by needing to invalidate and restart
>    the whole gate queue.

All good things, Sean ++.

Might I also suggest one other thing that, IMO, would reduce gate
contention?

What if we added an option to git review that would inject something
into the git commit message that would indicate the patch author felt
the patch does not need to have integration testing run against it.

Lots of patches make no substantive code changes and just clean up
style, comments, or documentation. Having integration tests run for
these patches is just noise and provides no value. There should be a way
to indicate to Zuul not to run integration testing if some marker is in
the commit message.

For example, let us imagine that issuing:

git review --skip-integration-tests

would cause a git commit hook to execute that injected this marker into
the commit message:

Skip-Integration-Tests

in the same way that the Change-Id commit hook injects the 

Change-Id: Ixxxxx

line into the commit message.

A -core reviewer would see Skip-Integration-Tests in the commit message.
If the -core reviewer disagreed with the patch author that the patch did
not have substantive code changes and actually wanted integration tests
to be run for the patch, they could simply ask the patch author to run a
git commit --amend and remove the Skip-Integration-Tests line from the
commit message.

If a -core reviewer did a +1A on a patch that had a
Skip-Integration-Test marker in the commit message, Zuul would simply
not execute the integration tests and would only execute things like
rebase/merge conflict checks, and if all those basic tests succeeded,
merge the patch into the target branch.

This should significantly reduce the gate contention IMO, and should not
be difficult at all to implement.

Best,
-jay