Subject: Re: [PATCH] ci: avoid ubuntu:rolling in most jobs for now

From: Patrick Steinhardt <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 6 Feb 2026 08:39:54 +0100

On Thu, Feb 05, 2026 at 01:26:42PM -0800, Junio C Hamano wrote:
> We just was hit by buggy uutils dirname in ubuntu:rolling.
> Avoid breakage caused by being on the bleeding edge.
> 
> Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <[email-masked]>
> ---
> 
>  * So here is what I have near the merge of "let's test contrib/
>    stuff as well" in 'seen' for today's integration to avoid getting
>    hit by broken dirname in ubuntu:rolling reported earlier in
> 
>     https://lore.kernel.org/git/[email-masked]/
> 
>    Until uutils used by ubuntu:rolling stabilizes a bit more, we may
>    want to keep a patch like this in our CI jobs.  Or we may offer
>    ourselves as a guinea-pig?  I do not have strong preference
>    either way.

I think being a guinea-pig and reporting any issues we find to upstream
would be the best outcome. It's feasible that eventually, Ubuntu may
fully switch over to uutils, and if that's the case it would be great if
we had already ironed out all the bugs that we happen to hit ourselves.

So I think demoting to "latest" is a fine intermediate step to fix our
CI, but ideally we'd do a similar workaround to the sudo.ws workaround
we have in "ci/install-dependencies.sh" so that we only disable the
pieces that _don't_ work. That'd make it easy to contiue using the parts
that _do_ work, and once the bug has been fixed upstreamed and has
become part of Ubuntu we can then disable the workaround.

I plan to have a deeper look at our CI next week anyway to fix some
small warts and a test failure that we hit on GitLab with the MSVC job.
So maybe we commit your fix as an intermediate step, and I'll then
revert it and come up with a more localized fix?

Thanks!

Patrick