Otto Kekäläinen via developers <developers@lists.mariadb.org> writes:
least the job amd64-fedora-38-last-N-failed is always failing and it would not have found its way into the codebase if a protected branch policy would require that all commits must have a passing CI status before getting pushed/merged.
This is not correct, unfortunately. You are assuming that CI status is consistent for a given commit. If this was the case, getting a green CI would be easy, just a matter of discipline, as you say. The problem is testcases that fail sporadically; that is, they normally pass but fail at random in a small percentage of runs. Branch protection will do nothing to prevent these failures from entering the tree. It just makes developers waste time clicking "retry" on the builders to try and get lucky on another test run. To get the failures fixed, someone has to spend the considerable time and effort required to debug the failure and understand and fix the issue. Either by debugging herself, or researching in git history and finding and working with the appropriate developer to solve the issue. Is it harsh to expect this from pull request authors? Maybe. But *someone* has to do it. If not the person who sees the failure in his test run, then who? - Kristian.