I have some reservations about this change, and I'm not sure we should be encouraging people to use DONTBUILD (I was actually thinking we should deprecate it entirely from the vcs backend). There are two problems with DONTBUILD: 1. Pushes that use it can't have jobs backfilled or new jobs added. This makes it difficult for sheriffs. 2. They can cause us to skip backstops (if a DONTBUILD push's pushid happens to be a multiple of 10). This can limit the number of merge candidates sheriffs have to central. Seeing that we are getting smarter and smarter about what gets scheduled for any given push, I think we should discourage its use and instead allow our algorithms to handle things (if a trivial patch ends up scheduling lots of stuff, then that is a bug we should fix). My worry is that the new lando UI will encourage developers to use it, when instead we should be discouraging it. Sorry for posting all this after the fact, I didn't know this was in the works :(. The change is well intentioned and if not for the problems mentioned above, would be a great idea!
Bug 1642939 Comment 2 Edit History
Note: The actual edited comment in the bug view page will always show the original commenter’s name and original timestamp.
I have some reservations about this change, and I'm not sure we should be encouraging people to use DONTBUILD (I was actually thinking we should deprecate it entirely from the vcs backend). There are two problems with DONTBUILD: 1. Pushes that use it can't have jobs backfilled or new jobs added. This makes it difficult for sheriffs. 2. They can cause us to skip backstops (if a DONTBUILD push's pushid happens to be a multiple of 10). This can limit the number of merge candidates sheriffs have to central as well as increase regression ranges. Seeing that we are getting smarter and smarter about what gets scheduled for any given push, I think we should discourage its use and instead allow our algorithms to handle things (if a trivial patch ends up scheduling lots of stuff, then that is a bug we should fix). My worry is that the new lando UI will encourage developers to use it, when instead we should be discouraging it. Sorry for posting all this after the fact, I didn't know this was in the works :(. The change is well intentioned and if not for the problems mentioned above, would be a great idea!