Hi everyone using Salsa, I'd like to kindly ask maintainers to temporarily disable Salsa CI on their repositories *if* the pipeline is persistently failing and there are no immediate plans to fix it.
The core purpose of a Continuous Integration system is to catch new regressions. When a pipeline is already in a permanently red state, it loses this utility: it can no longer flag new issues, because everything is already masked by the existing failures. This isn't just a theoretical problem but a real issue affecting our shared infrastructure right now. Currently, roughly 30% of all Salsa CI pipelines are failing. Looking at the data, probably 10% of the packages on Salsa should have their CI pipelines turned off until they are ready to be maintained. Leaving these broken pipelines running has two major downsides: * Wasting shared infrastructure resources: Persistently failing pipelines burn through limited runner time and CPU cycles. This steals precious machine time from other packages and maintainers who are actively relying on the CI to test useful, landable changes. * Wasting human contributor time: When team members or QA contributors look into automated failures, it is incredibly frustrating to dig through logs only to discover that the package has been failing for months and the maintainer isn't currently using the CI output. It diverts human attention away from actionable bugs, and prevents new contributors from using CI to gain confidence that they didn't break anything testable. If you don't have the bandwidth to fix a broken Salsa CI setup right now, that is completely fine, but please consider disabling the pipeline or removing the salsa-ci.yml file (or set rules:never [1]) until you are ready to tackle it. It takes only a moment and frees up vital resources for the entire development community. Of course, there are also cases where Salsa CI fails because something is genuinely broken (e.g. today I looked at rtpengine, which has autopkgtest failing in Salsa CI and continues to upload, causing Debian CI to fail as well). However, people won't pay attention to real failures if too many packages have unmaintained and permanently failing Salsa CI results. If you do want to use Salsa CI but struggle to get it fully green, you can also just disable the failing jobs without turning off the entire pipeline [2]. Thanks for your cooperation and for helping keep our shared infrastructure efficient! [1] https://salsa.debian.org/salsa-ci-team/pipeline#completely-disable-the-pipeline [2] https://salsa.debian.org/salsa-ci-team/pipeline#select-which-jobs-run-in-the-ci-pipeline
