On Thu, Nov 03, 2022 at 10:23:56PM -0400, Taylor Blau wrote:
> But I think you make a compelling point (which doesn't match my own
> workflow, but I can see the utility of nonetheless).
>
> I was thinking that we could rely on something similar to the ci-config
> ref stuff from back in e76eec35540 (ci: allow per-branch config for
> GitHub Actions, 2020-05-07), but it looks like it'll be a little
> trickier than that, maybe impossible.
>
> We need to know about the state of the ci-config branch before we set
> the concurrency bits. So I think you *could* do something like:
As an aside, I wish there was a way to interpret per-repo environment
variables in the actual action config. The current ci-config stuff
works, but it's pretty horrible because (if I understand correctly) it
spins up a VM just to evaluate a glob and say "nope, no CI needed on
this branch". So:
1. It's wasteful of resources, compared to a system where the Actions
parser can evaluate a variable.
2. It makes the Actions results page for a repo ugly, because skipped
branches clutter the output with "yes, I passed CI" even though all
they passed was a trivial job to say "don't bother running more
CI".
3. The problem you mention: it happens too late to affect the overall
Actions flow, and instead individual jobs have to take it into
account.
When I wrote the original ci-config stuff I looked for an alternative.
You _can_ set per-repo variables in the form of secrets, but I couldn't
find a way to evaluate them at the top-level of the yaml file. But maybe
that has improved in the meantime. I had looked against as recently as a
month or two ago and didn't find anything, but I'm far from an expert on
Actions.
-Peff
