Re: Understanding CI in Salsa, timeouts and runners

Soren Stoutner <[email protected]> Thu, 04 Jun 2026 13:46:45 -0700

Newsgroups	gmane.linux.debian.devel.general
Organization	Debian
Message-ID	<6721713.j6PcuT4dK6@soren-desktop>

On Thursday, June 4, 2026 7:43:48 AM Mountain Standard Time Ben Hutchings 
wrote:
> On Wed, 2026-06-03 at 17:50 -0700, Soren Stoutner wrote:
> > On Tuesday, June 2, 2026 5:49:22 AM Mountain Standard Time Ben Hutchings
> > 
> > wrote:
> > > The current maximum of 3 hours is already an absurdly long time to wait
> > > for CI.
> > 
> > That depends on what you are building.  Have you ever tried to build
> > Chromium? Or Qt WebEngine?
> 
> Thankfully no.  And I did not mean to imply that I could offer a
> solution that would work for every package.  My point was that it's a
> terrible developer experience to have to wait hours for CI (or a local
> build).  If it's not possible to run a build via Salsa in 3 hours then
> you might as well give up on that and only do local builds, which are
> almost certainly going to be faster.
> 
> The fact that some large corporations produce monolithic software
> releases that take an absurdly long time for us to build is a reflection
> of the much greater computing resources they have.  I think it also
> shows a lack of concern for a wider community of developers and
> distributors.

I think it just represents that some software is this big and requires this 
much build time.

Regarding custom runners, I would recommend the following wiki, which I mostly 
authored:

https://wiki.debian.org/Salsa/Doc/CustomRunners

It allows you to use much longer Salsa CI timeouts, and also to run Salsa CI 
on more powerful hardware.

-- 
Soren Stoutner
[email protected]

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