Subject: Re: [PATCH 1/4] ci: drop run-docker scripts

From: Patrick Steinhardt <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 12 Sep 2024 12:40:56 +0200

On Thu, Sep 12, 2024 at 05:43:36AM -0400, Jeff King wrote:
> We haven't used these scripts since 4a6e4b9602 (CI: remove Travis CI
> support, 2021-11-23), as the GitHub Actions config has support for
> directly running jobs within docker containers.
> 
> It's possible we might want to resurrect something like this in order to
> be more agnostic to the CI platform. But it's not clear exactly what it
> would look like. And in the meantime, it's just a maintenance burden as
> we make changes to CI config, and is subject to bitrot. In fact it's
> already broken; it references ci/install-docker-dependencies.sh, which
> went away in 9cdeb34b96 (ci: merge scripts which install dependencies,
> 2024-04-12).
> 
> Signed-off-by: Jeff King <[email-masked]>
> ---
> I think this is worth doing even if we don't take the rest of the
> patches. But obviously it gets even more bit-rotted as the other patches
> change the CI config file.

I initially wanted to use them for GitLab CI, but eventually I figured
that it makes way more sense to just merge the setup instructions we
have into a single, unified script. Docker or not doesn't really matter
all that much when you want to install dependencies. What matters more
is the actual platform you're on, but that is independent of Docker
anyway.

The only remaining usecase I could see for these is to run CI-like
builds on a developer's machine. But the fact that these scripts don't
work at all anymore and have started to bitrot already demonstrates that
nobody does seem to do that in the first place.

So I think removing them is the right thing to do.

Patrick