Introducing bugs that are caught by slow validate?

[Ömer Sinan Ağacan]

Hi all,

I just run slow validate and it actually catches bugs (#16529) and some
configuration problems in the test definitions (#!700). These are not caught by
the CI jobs because they run normal validate instead of slow.

(Actually they don't even run the validate script, but they run "test" instead
of "slowtest", which I think is the main difference between normal validate and
slow validate)

As far as I can see we have nightly job definitions in .gitlab-ci.yml, which do
slow validate, but I'm not sure if those are used?

Would it be possible to switch over to slow validate in CI jobs? If slow
validate takes too long on the CI servers, could we maybe configure CI tasks so
that if the MR submitter is Marge, we run slow validate, otherwise we run fast
validate?

The problem with nightly jobs (assuming they're used) is that it's too late by
the time they catch a test failure because the commits are already in the tree,
and because nothing's blocked the bugs are more likely to stay unfixed.

Ömer