Both Tamar and Omer are right. 

• Not doing CI on Windows is bad.   It means that bugs get introduced, and not discovered until later. This is Tamer’s point, and it is valid.
• Holding up MRs because a failures in Windows CI that is unrelated to the MR is also bad. It a frustrating waste of time, and discourages all authors.  (In contrast, holding up an MR because it introduces a bug on Windows is fine,  indeed desirable.)   This is Omer’s point, and it is valid.

The obvious solution is: let’s fix Windows CI, so that it doesn’t fail except when the MR genuinely introduces a bug.

How hard would it be to do that?   Do we even know what the problem is?

Simon

From: ghc-devs <ghc-devs-bounces@haskell.org> On Behalf Of Phyx
Sent: 17 January 2020 06:49
To: Ömer Sinan Ağacan <omeragacan@gmail.com>
Cc: ghc-devs <ghc-devs@haskell.org>
Subject: Re: Windows testsuite failures

Oh I spent a non-insignificant amount of time back in the phabricator days to make the CI stable. Now because people were committing to master directly without going through CI it was always a cat and mouse game and I gave up eventually. 

Now we have rewritten the CI and it's pointing out actual issues in the compiler. And your suggestion is well let's just ignore it. 

How about you use some of that energy to help I stead of taking the easy way? And I bet you're going to say you don't care about Windows to which I would say I don't care about the non-threaded runtime and wish we would get rid of it. But can't always get what you want. 

And to say we'll actually fix anything before release doesn't align with what I've seen so far, which had me scrambling last minute to ensure we can release Windows instead of making releases without it. 

Quite frankly I don't need you to tell me to submit MRs to fix it since that's what I spent again a lot of time doing. Or maybe you would like to pay my paycheck so I can spend more than a considerable amount of my free time on it. 

Kind regards, 

Tamar 

Sent from my Mobile

On Fri, Jan 17, 2020, 06:17 Ömer Sinan Ağacan <omeragacan@gmail.com> wrote:

We release more often than once in 6 months.

We clearly have no idea how to test on Windows. If you know how to do it then
feel free to submit a MR. Otherwise blocking every MR indefinitely is worse than
testing Windows less frequently.

Ömer

Phyx <lonetiger@gmail.com>, 17 Oca 2020 Cum, 09:10 tarihinde şunu yazdı:
>
> Sure because only testing once every 6 months is a very very good idea...
>
> Sent from my Mobile
>
> On Fri, Jan 17, 2020, 06:03 Ömer Sinan Ağacan <omeragacan@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Hi Ben,
>>
>> Can we please disable Windows CI? I've spent more time fighting the CI than
>> doing useful work this week, it's really frustrating.
>>
>> Since we have no idea how to fix it maybe we should test Windows only before a
>> release, manually (and use bisect in case of regressions).
>>
>> Ömer
>>
>> Ben Gamari <ben@smart-cactus.org>, 14 Oca 2020 Sal, 14:30 tarihinde şunu yazdı:
>> >
>> > Hi all,
>> >
>> > Currently Windows CI is a bit flaky due to some unfortunately rather elusive testsuite driver bugs. Progress in resolving this has been a bit slow due to travel over the last week but I will be back home tomorrow and should be able to resolve the issue soon thereafter.
>> >
>> > Cheers,
>> >
>> > - Ben
>> > _______________________________________________
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>> > ghc-devs@haskell.org
>> > http://mail.haskell.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/ghc-devs
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