Matthew Pickering
I am against any proposed change which makes it easier to break the build on any platform. Someone, usually Ben, has to waste a lot of time fixing these breakages and if master does not build it affects every developer.
Indeed, I agree with Matthew here. Breakages are very painful both when they happen and after when we need to bisect through them.
If a commit breaks the build then it should prevent the patch being merged. Now that CI is robust, this is a realistic goal.
My preferred solution is to start using "marge-bot" which is battle tested solution for this precise problem. We don't need to reinvent our own solution. Hopefully the native support in gitlab will improve over time but for now it is the highest impact change we can make whilst maintaining the core principles of CI.
I would be fine with trying to deploy it. My thought was that it would be "only" a few months of manually working around the issue until an upstream solution arrived. However, I agree that this may be just long enough to justify deploying an interim solution. I can try this today if others agree this is a reasonable way forward. Cheers, - Ben