Re: how to manage Cirrus on personal repository

Hi,

On 2023-09-29 11:13:24 +0200, Peter Eisentraut wrote:
> I have a private repository on GitHub where I park PostgreSQL development
> work. I also have Cirrus activated on that repository, to build those
> branches, using the existing Cirrus configuration.
>
> Now under the new system of limited credits that started in September, this
> blew through the credits about half-way through the month.

:(

> Does anyone have an idea how to manage this better? Is there maybe a way to
> globally set "only trigger manually", or could we make one?

One way is to configure to run under a custom compute account. If we get
credits from google, that might be realistic to provide to many hackers, it's
not that expensive to do.

Another thing is to work on our tests - we apparently waste *tremendous*
amounts of time due to tap tests forking psql over and over.

We definitely can provide a way to configure on a repo level which tests run
automatically. I think that would be useful not just for turning things
manual, but also the opposite, enabling tests that we don't want everybody to
run to automatically run as part of cfbot. E.g. running mingw tests during
cfbot while keeping it manual for everyone else.

Maybe we should have two environment variables, which can be overwritten set
on a repository level, one to make manual tasks run by default, and one the
other way?

> I suppose one way to deal with this is to make a second repository and only
> activate Cirrus on that one, and push there on demand.

You already can control which platforms are run via commit messages,
fwiw. By adding, e.g.:
ci-os-only: linux, macos

Greetings,

Andres Freund