Allowing Windows CI to fail

[Simon Peyton Jones]

Ben

This sounds like a good decision to me, thanks.

Is there a possibility to have a slow CI-on-windows job (not part of the "this must pass before merging" step), which will slowly, but reliably, fail if the Windows build fails. E.g. does it help to make the build be 100% sequential?

Or is there currently no way to build GHC at all on Windows in a way that won't fail?  (That would be surprising to me.  Until relatively recently I was *only* building on Windows.)

Simon

| -----Original Message-----
| From: ghc-devs <ghc-devs-bounces at haskell.org> On Behalf Of Ben Gamari
| Sent: 03 February 2020 16:03
| To: GHC developers <ghc-devs at haskell.org>
| Subject: Allowing Windows CI to fail
| 
| Hi everyone,
| 
| After multiple weeks of effort struggling to get Windows CI into a stable
| condition I'm sorry to say that we're going to need to revert to allowing
| it to fail for a bit longer. The status quo is essentially holding up the
| entire merge queue and we still seem quite far from resolving the issues.
| 
| I have summarised the current state-of-play in #17777. In short, the gcc
| toolchain likely can't be used reliably on Windows due to its ubiquitous
| use of `exec`, which cannot be reliably implemented on Windows.
| 
| Switching to LLVM as our native toolchain was my (initially promising)
| last-ditch attempt at avoiding this issue but sadly this looks to be a long
| road. My current attempt is stuck on an inscrutable loader error.
| 
| For the short-term, I am afraid I have run out of time for this effort.
| My current plan is to merge what I can from my wip/windows-ci branch but
| again enable the Windows CI jobs' allow_failure flag so that its unreliable
| nature doesn't hold up otherwise-passing CI jobs.
| 
| While it's unfortunately that we still lack reliable CI on Windows, I think
| the effords of the last few weeks were quite worthwhile. We now
| have:
| 
|  * A much better understanding of the issues affecting us on Windows
|  * Significantly better documentation and automation for producing our
|    mingw toolchain artifacts
|  * better scripting for setting up Windows CI runners
|  * fixed several bugs in the ghc-jailbreak library used to work
|    around the Windows MAX_PATH limitation
| 
| Many thanks to Tamar Christina for his many hours of patient help.
| Without him, GHC's Windows support would be in significantly worse shape
| than it is.
| 
| Users of GHC should note that the CI issues we are struggling with *do
| not* affect compiled code. These bugs manifest only as (rare) failed
| compilations (particularly when building GHC itself); however, once
| compilation succeeds the program that results is correct and reliable.
| 
| Cheers,
| 
| - Ben