1786311 - Requesting interactive tasks in Gecko is not intuitive

Status: NEW

(Firefox Build System :: Task Configuration, task)

Description

[Andrew Halberstadt [:ahal]]

Taskcluster has a built-in feature called Create with SSH/VNC which creates a clone of the current task in interactive mode, then redirects to the /connect endpoint where the user will be able to connect to a shell and/or VNC session when the interactive state switches to "Ready".

For whatever reason, in Gecko we've disabled this feature and instead created a custom Create Interactive action. Possibly due to the security concerns listed in the comments there? Though there's a firewall that should block access to all L3 tasks anyway.. so I'm not too sure what this action would be solving.

Anyway, whatever the reason, the fact we have an action task that then creates the interactive task is making for bad UX.

1. If you trigger the action from Treeherder, there's no obvious way to get to the interactive task's shell. You need to go to the Taskcluster details page of the action, find the dependent task, then either append /connect to the URL or click the shell.html artifact.

2. If you trigger the action from Taskcluster, it's even worse. It redirects you to the /connect endpoint of the action task and not of the interactive task you are interested in. So you'll be sitting waiting for interactive state to be "Ready", but that will never happen because the action task isn't actually interactive. Meanwhile, your real interactive session has expired in the background.

We should either fix these problems (I'm not sure how), or look into removing the Create Interactive action and go back to using the built-in Taskcluster Create with SSH/VNC feature. Possibly Treeherder could link directly to that page en lieu of an action.