[Development] Proposals for changes to "Precheck" feature

[Volker Hilsheimer]

Hey ho,

We’ve had the convenient “precheck’” button in gerrit for a while now, allowing approvers to kick off a CI-dry-run to check if things would pass an integration before asking for reviews, and without the risk of tearing down a bunch of co-staged changes in case of failure.

Two things that I think could be improved there, and I’d like your feedback to those:

* always rebase the commit before prechecking

Right now, precheck is a checkout, which means that the precheck is done on top of the revision that it was pushed from. Since that is not the revision that it will ultimately integrate against, this makes the precheck less accurate. And it also ends up wasting CI resources if the precheck is done for a leaf repo, with a revision that might have ancient dependencies. Then qtbase etc from those dependency revisions might need to be rebuilt if they are not in the artefact cache anymore.


* always test all platforms, don’t bail out on first failure

If I run a precheck, then I want to know about all the things that are wrong with my patch, not just the first thing.


What do y’all think? Any other improvements we could make here?

Cheers,
Volker