bug#65391: People need to report failing builds even though we have ci.guix.gnu.org for that

[Csepp <raingloom@riseup.net>]

Maxime Devos <maximedevos@telenet.be> writes:

> [[PGP Signed Part:Undecided]]
>
>
> Op 23-08-2023 om 01:45 schreef Csepp:
>> Also the CI UI could use some improvements.  I'm pretty sure I've
>> mentioned this before, but there is no easy way to find out which inputs
>> I need to fix to make a dependency failure disappear.  I think everyone
>> has better things to do than perform a linear search by hand.
>
> Go to the package of a failed build, e.g.
> <https://ci.guix.gnu.org/build/1840209/details>. The dependencies you
> need to fix are marked with a red cross or a red danger triangle. In
> case of a danger triangle, you need to look at the dependencies of the
> dependency, which you can visit via the hyperlink.
>
> I don't see any linear search here.
>
> Best regards,
> Maxime Devos.
>
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>
> [[End of PGP Signed Part]]

That is precisely what the linear search algorithm is.  I should not
have to look through the dependency tree to figure out if two package
failures have the same cause, or to know how many (possibly indirect)
dependencies of a package are failing.
As an example, pandoc often fails to build on i686, but when you look at
the CI page, you see that it was caused by several of its inputs
failing, all due to some of *their* dependencies.
Now, you could dig down on one branch of the dependency DAG and find one
failing package, but that doesn't *actually* answer the question: "what
packages do I need to fix to enable this one?", because it could have
multiple failing inputs instead of just one.  The only way to tell is to
look at each page, that means having to visually find each failing input
on the page, wait for their CI pages to load, and repeat the whole
process.
If your browser is not particularly fast or you aren't so quick at
navigating a webpage, this can take a while.
But for the CI server, generating this information would take less than
a second.
Maybe some people value their time so little that they are fine with
doing this the manual way, but personally I have better things to do.