Re: Should we add debug_parallel_query=regress to CI?

Hi,

On 2025-03-05 12:29:15 -0500, Tom Lane wrote:
> Andres Freund <andres(at)anarazel(dot)de> writes:
> > I guess we could be add a "standardized" section at the top of each task
> > describing their oddities? Not sure it's worth it.
>
> I think this does need to be documented somewhere/somehow, just so
> that people don't waste time focusing on "it's failing on FreeBSD"
> when the actual cause is some other thing we happened to load
> onto that task.

0002 is a first draft for one way to do this.

Of course this still requires somebody analyzing a failure to look at
cirrus.tasks.yml, but I don't know if we can do a whole lot about that?

I wondered about making the SPECIAL thing an environment variable instead of a
comment, that way it'd probably be visible to cfbot. But I don't really see
what it could do with that information.

I guess we could make the SPECIAL: comments into echos in a
special_script:

that way it would show up as an explicit "section" in the per-task CI
output. But I don't know how much that would help, the failures due to the
tasks specialness could be during build, testing etc, so the "special" section
won't necessarily be close to the failing step.

Greetings,

Andres Freund