Greetings, During the various CI pipelines, sometimes a test setup or lab will have an internal failure unrelated to the specific patch. Perhaps 'master' branch (or the associated -next branch) is broken and we cannot get a successful run anyway. Perhaps a network outage occurs during infrastructure setup. Perhaps some other transient error clobbers the setup. In all of these cases the report to the mailing flags the patch as 'FAIL'.
It would be very helpful if maintainers had the ability to tell various CI infrastructures to restart / rerun patch tests. For now, this has to be done by the individual managers of those labs. Some labs, it isn't possible. Others, it's possible but is a very time-consuming process to restart a test case. In all cases, a maintainer needs to spend time communicating with a lab manager. This could be made a bit nicer. One proposal we (Michael and I) have toyed with for our lab is having the infrastructure monitor patchwork comments for a restart flag, and kick off based on that information. Patchwork tracks all of the comments for each patch / series so we could look at the series that are still in a state for 'merging' (new, assigned, etc) and check the patch .comments API for new comments. Getting the data from PW should be pretty simple - but I think that knowing whether to kick off the test might be more difficult. We have concerns about which messages we should accept (for example, can anyone ask for a series to be rerun, and we'll need to track which rerun messages we've accepted). The convention needs to be something we all can work with (ie: /Re-check: [checkname] or something as a single line in the email). This is just a start to identify and explain the concern. Maybe there are other issues we've not considered, or maybe folks think this is a terrible idea not worth spending any time developing. I think there's enough use for it that I am raising it here, and we can discuss it. Thanks, -Aaron
