Re: How to do add-on merge requests and get a pipeline to run?

Jonas Hahnfeld <[email protected]> writes:

> On Tue, 2026-08-11 at 22:26 +0200, David Kastrup wrote:
>> This means that I could change the behavior for just my branch by
>> pushing a commit changing its .gitlab-ci.yml file; but if the branch
>> got merged, this would change global policies?
>
> Yes, in the end it's just a normal file. That happens to steer the
> entire pipeline configuration, so somewhat more important - let's
> discuss first what we actually want. For the moment, I would recommend
> following the "established approach" (see Werner's explanations).

Personally I would rather call it a "clumsy workaround" rather than an
"established approach".  And it may have been the best we could do until
recently, given your info about GitLab history.

But just because it has been done before for lack of something better
does not really make it desirable.  It leads to people getting a
parallel review of A and A+B.  If they suggest changes to A+B that
actually concern A, incorporating the feedback becomes a royal mess.
Particularly when trying to use the web interface.

Now I realize that this is partly my impatience speaking: I am just now
reembarking on working more thoroughly on LilyPond internals as part of
justifying my renewed call for funding both in my own eyes as well as
those of people who have heeded my call.

That means slogging through and refactoring quite a few things, and
being able to let people even _look_ at various related proposals in
week-long intervals or not being able to show "ok, this concern is
valid, but it will be mitigated with other only loosely related work
that is already being developed and will need to make some changes on
top of the current work" is tedious.

I really think our review procedures and CI are a good thing, and I have
no problem with dependent merge requests only being allowed to reach
countdown/push stages sequentially.  But in the mean time, they should
be reviewable properly, and the staged merge request feature of GitLab
seems like it could really support this quite handily.

I'll try seeing whether I manage to come up with something workable for
the .gitlab-ci.yml file.

-- 
David Kastrup